Caravans / Campervans

A car KIT covers a roadside incident until help arrives. A van KIT covers weeks of ordinary life: the cuts from setting up, the burns from the stove, the bites, the sprains, and the one serious thing that happens a long way from a hospital.

The SURVIVAL First Aid KIT - Large is the right size for most vans. It carries the depth to treat three or more people and to keep going when one dressing is never enough. The SURVIVAL First Aid KIT - Medium suits a couple, or lives in the tow vehicle as a second.

WHERE TO MOUNT IT

Somewhere fixed, at eye level, reachable from the door.

The temptation is a drawer or an overhead locker, which works until the day you need it fast or the van is not level. Mount it where anyone can see it and reach it without opening three other things first, and tell whoever travels with you where it is.

If you tow, carry a second KIT in the vehicle. When the van is unhitched at a site and you drive into town, the KIT should not be forty kilometres behind you.

FREE CAMPING AND REMOTE STAYS

Caravan parks have people, power and usually phone coverage. Free camps and station stays often have none of those.

Work out before each leg how long help would actually take. If the answer is more than an hour, you need to carry for the serious case rather than the likely one, which means a splint, the ability to hold a bleed, and a snake bite KIT that is not buried in the boot.

The Outdoor Bundle (Gen 8) and the Camping First Aid Bundle are both built around that thinking.

SNAKES COME TO THE VAN

Awnings, annexes, wood piles, the shade under the van and the warm concrete of a slab. Snakes use all of them, and the bite usually happens on the way to the toilet block at night.

The SURVIVAL Snake Bite KIT carries a SMART Bandage with a pictogram printed along it, developed with snake safety experts SSSafe. The pictogram changes from a rectangle to a square when you reach the right tension, so you can see it rather than guess at two in the morning. SURVIVAL recommends proper first aid training alongside any KIT.

TRAVELLING WITH GRANDKIDS

Different injuries, and usually more of them.

Kids at a campsite find the fire, the towbar and the dark. Everything inside the KIT is colour-coded and labelled, and Gen 8 adds a pictogram to every label, so an older child can find the right item if they reach it before you do.

Also see Camping, 4WDing and Car.