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Medical Crews Polish Skills on High-tech Mannequins
He has a pulse, a beating heart and lungs that breathe. He can even blink and have seizures. He’s only a mannequin, but to educators and medical crewmembers at Air Evac Lifeteam, he is not your ordinary dummy.
Manufactured by Medical Education Technologies, Inc. (METI), the Emergency Care Simulator™ (ECS) is being used by Air Evac’s flight nurses and flight paramedics to help hone their emergency medicine skills. The company, headquartered in West Plains, Mo., purchased seven simulators to train their employees in the field. The air ambulance company operates 63 bases in 11 states, including 11 bases in the state of Texas.
The ECS was developed by METI to specifically address the unique challenge of emergency medical care. The lifelike simulator is medically authentic and allows educators to simulate a broad spectrum of symptoms, giving students the ability to practice a variety of lifesaving skills in any environment.
“As emergency medicine professionals, we have to be able to make instant assessments of our patients and determine the best path of medical care,” said Air Evac Lifeteam Clinical Educator Shari Evans. “This simulator allows us to recreate lifelike scenarios so our crewmembers can improve their skills. The best possible response to any trauma must become second nature and the quality of training they receive with the simulator helps us improve the outcome of those responses.”
The simulator comes with prepackaged scenarios, including cardiac arrest, asthma, respiratory failure, congestive heart failure, and trauma injuries. Educators can also create their own scenarios, often based on real-life medical cases seen by crewmembers in the field. Students have the ability to insert breathing tubes, start IV’s, administer drugs, put in chest tubes, do CPR, and even defibrillate the patient to bring an irregular heart rate under control.
An educator at a computer workstation punches in information to correlate to the action taken by the students so the students can see the results of the actions they take. If they take the wrong action, the mannequin’s vital signs will start to plummet and they have to determine how to bring him back.
“The simulator is so lifelike, it can take an emotional toll on the students as they watch his vital signs fall and work to bring him back,” Evans said. “That’s all part of the education process. We’d rather the students face those scenarios here in a controlled environment where they can work on improving their skills and be better prepared when they face the real thing in the field.
“We can challenge the students with a nightmare of symptoms – wheezing lungs, dilated pupils, falling blood pressure,” she added. “When the students have to actually work through the problem on their own and find the solution, they learn better and they remember it the next time they face it in real life.”
Air Evac Lifeteam Clinical Care Services Director Robbie Covert said they have been using the simulators for training for about three or four months and are very pleased with the results.
“It provides us with an extraordinary advantage over traditional classroom training,” Covert said. “Our goal is to get our students to use their critical thinking skills as a team, while under stress. They already know the right answers and already have the skills when they come to work for us, but this training gives them that extra edge and confidence they need to put those skills to work when time is of the essence.
“The real winners in all of this are the patients we will be taking care of in the future,” Covert said. “When our flight crews arrive on that scene, with the rotors still spinning and a patient gasping for breath, we know that patient will receive the most expert, highest quality care available.”
Our partnership with METI on the project has been very rewarding,” Covert added. “This company is committed to developing learning tools that impact the education of our future doctors, nurses, first responders and military medics. They share the same goal as Air Evac Lifeteam – to improve patient safety and ultimately save more lives. We feel very privileged to be one of their first customers in the air medical field.”
METI President and CEO Lou Oberndorf said METI is honored to be a partner in Air Evac’s lifesaving mission.
“Air Evac Lifeteam medical crews provide lifesaving skills for the critically ill and injured patients in rural America under some of the most challenging of circumstances,” Oberndorf said. “We’re please to help them as they meet those challenges. Over the past decade patient simulators have become the gold standard in how medical teams train to work together to save lives by providing a safe environment in which to practice.”
Air Evac Lifeteam is a leading provider of air medical transportation to rural communities throughout the central United States. The membership-supported air ambulance company provides on-the-scene medical attention during the critical hour following an accident or medical emergency, rapid transport to medical facilities and critical care inter-facility transfers.
For more information about Air Evac Lifeteam, call 1-800-793-0010 or visit www.lifeteam.net. Information about Medical Education Technologies, Inc. can be found at www.meti.com
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