New Emergency Training Center Offers Risk-Free Life and Death Lessons
August 9, 2007
A car spins out of control, its driver pinned behind the wheel, his right leg cut deeply by the jagged metal of the floor. Dazed, confused and losing blood, the driver loses consciousness. In minutes, sirens are wailing and the Emergency Medical Technicians arrive, assess the situation, and begin stabilizing the patient, preparing him for the trip to the hospital for treatment that will save his life. The EMTs work quickly and expertly inside the ambulance . . . but this is not just any ambulance, nor is this just any patient, it's a specially constructed "emergency medicine simulator" and mannequin - all part of the Emergency Medical Simulation Unit at Phelps Memorial Hospital Center where emergency scenarios like this one enable first responders to experience "real-life" lifesaving events. "Providing life-saving medical care is complex," notes Jeff Meade, Director, Emergency Life Support of Phelps Memorial Hospital. "In the new Frank and Lisina Hoch Center for Emergency Education, which will open this summer at Phelps, EMTs, Firefighters and various healthcare providers will have access to the same type of simulation technologies that pilots use to build critical emergency experience."
The 7,000 square foot Center will have a state-of-the-art emergency medicine
simulator. The nearly 2 million dollar project houses three rooms, one resembling
a home environment, another the inside of an ambulance, and the third, a hospital
emergency room. In the simulated "Emergency Room," even the monitors
can be programmed to display exactly like the monitoring system the student
will use in his practice. The simulated ambulance will allow EMTs to become
familiar with the arrangement of equipment and to become comfortable functioning
inside the ambulance space. Practicing the loading and unloading of patients
in a realistic ambulance setting will help prevent injury to the EMT when lifting
a real patient and ensure that this critical transfer can be done smoothly.
The simulated settings are so realistic that students will feel a palpable tension
as they make their patient management decisions. The lifelike computerized mannequins
that can be programmed to "experience" a variety of medical conditions
represent a major advance in medical training because they allow students and
practitioners to develop a substantially broader base of crisis experience.
They can be programmed with constricted airways, the rise and fall of the chest,
vital signs and breath sounds, even the ability to respond to anesthesia and
drugs. These factors combine to provide the most realistic, risk-free learning
experience available to students today.
"Students will have the opportunity to inject a drug in exactly the same
way they would do on a live patient and observe the reaction in an extremely
realistic way," Meade notes. "At the same time, if the student injects
too much or too little, there is no real threat to anyone's well-being. In a
simulator training session, a student will typically go through an entire scenario
and see what outcome occurs," Meade says. "The simulated patient could,
for example, die, or the scenario could go on to other pathways of progressive
difficulty if a student fails to do the right thing."
"Just as an airline pilot learns to handle emergencies in the air by training
on a flight simulator" explains Meade, "students and practitioners
can learn how to safely handle crises they may not see every day. When they
do see these situations, they will know exactly how to respond because they
have trained for them on the simulator. Ultimately this type of training will
save lives."
The simulator will record the actions of the students and physiological responses
of the mannequin, and the training sessions will be digitally recorded (audio
and video) to allow for a follow-up review and critique session in a classroom.
During the debriefing, the teacher can offer positive reinforcement by pointing
out what was done well and also help the student identify what could have been
done differently that would change the outcome in real life and death situations.
Unlike working with live emergency patients, Meade says, "in real life,
we can't replay everything and say, 'You should have recognized that the patient
had a pneumothorax here; or you should have put a chest tube in there.' But
having been through these scenarios, the student will remember when the real
situation occurs, and his patients will benefit from his experience."
Phelps' Emergency Training Center was originally established two decades ago
and has provided nearly 30,000 training sessions to EMS agencies throughout
Westchester County and to hospital staff from throughout the NYC Metro region.
Physicians from as far away as Europe and New Zealand have attended some of
the Center's specialty programs. There has been expressed interest from other
healthcare education institutions, a school of nursing for example, about collaboration
that would allow their students to participate in training programs in the new
facility. The new center has been designed to prepare all levels of medical
care providers to manage medical emergencies - from the citizen CPR provider
to the specialist physician. In addition, it is equipped to conduct technical
patient decontamination training, which is, unfortunately, a much needed skill
in today's world, where we must be prepared for events we hope will never happen.
The Center is named for Frank and Lisina Hoch in recognition of their support for the construction of the Center where so many will learn to save lives.