From The Intensive Care Network – another podcast from the SMACC 2013 conference. This is Dr Karel Habig, Medical Director of the Greater Sydney Area HEMS, discussing how experience from aeromedical retrieval can improve medical practice.
Click HERE for the audio (right click to open it in a new tab), accompanying slides are below:
From ALiEM:
“CRM and SBT… just another set of acronyms in the world of medical education? Don’t we already have enough??
Not quite! Rather, Crisis Resource Management (CRM) is a complementary approach to Simulation Based Training (SBT). It can enhance current ongoing medical simulations or provide foundation for a vigorous curriculum when launching new simulation programs.
Crisis Resource Management is the ability to translate medical knowledge to real world actions, in the setting of an emergency.
Rather than a separate entity from medical simulation, CRM principles can be looked at as a way to focus and shape medical simulation curriculum and especially the objectives of each case to focus upon development of critical skill-sets that contribute to optimal team function and success during crisis.”
Read the rest HERE…
*Conditions apply: You ARE required to have a medical qualification that was not purchased over the internet, and you WILL occasionally have to share your flight with a patient or patients with varying pathologies. Oh, and you will occasionally have to make an appearance at the hospital too (which fortunately has a top-notch helipad)
Recently I had the pleasure of attending a superb AWLS course in Queenstown. The course was run by a group of intrepid clinicians who decided several years ago to import AWLS from the United States. You can read about the group (and more importantly, book a place on the course!) here:
Wilderness medicine is in may ways the ultimate in prehospital care – it involves providing care to patients in an frequently austere environment with often very limited personnel, equipment, and communications. For emergency department doctors like myself, it also separates us from the security of readily accessible diagnostic investigations.
At its core wilderness medicine represents the same pathologies as emergency medicine, although environmental issues are obviously more common than in our urban ED and regional HEMS (check out this article about some recent lightning strike patients treated in Waikato ED!). The challenges encountered by treating clinicians however are very different, and solutions rely on communication, improvisation, adaptation, clinical judgement, and common sense… plus (of course!) duct tape and a pocket knife.
The course itself included a variety of teaching formats including interactive lectures, group discussions, practical skill stations, and in-situ simulation. The organizers successfully arranged significant rainfall on one of the simulation afternoons – ever tried running a trauma resuscitation in the rain under a tarpaulin? (Credit is also due here to some of the local medical students, who were quite willing to become hypothermic for the sake of medical education)
Without giving away too much of the detail on the course, here are some examples of the material covered:
Single rescuer rolling a trauma patient with cervical spine control:
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Improvised rope sling carry for patient unable to walk
Improvised cervical collar
C-spine immobilization with Sam splint/backpack, alternatively device for restraining combative ED consultant – Logan Stuckey from Nambour
Splinting of fractured femur with ski pole
In situ simulation: Body on the shore – what will you do?
Pre-hospital external warming device (at least, that was the explanation given)
Resuscitation team in the rain!
Auckland HEMS 