Is a FNE solely designed for dive accident situations?
Although this Manual refers to patients/victims of dive accidents, communication with past students demonstrates that the FNE is useful in a variety of applications including potential spinal injury, cerebral cardiovascular accident, head injury, and hypoxia situations found in both diving and non-diving situations. Repetitive FNE’s are often an excellent method of keeping a patient occupied on something other than the problem while waiting for help to arrive or while enroute to the hospital. FNE’s can also be used to keep baseline records of dive members on public safety dive teams, scientific teams and commercial dive sites. Lifeguard Systems’ instructors, for example, have discovered hearing loss problems, asymmetrical muscle strength, … etc., that were unknown to the individual being demonstrated on during FNE training programs. The personal and team knowledge of such findings, along with perhaps a written record, could be helpful during the management of a potential dive acciden
