“It’s just a great way to recreate clinical patient scenarios where it’s okay to make mistakes,” Rauh said. “And we turn them into learning experiences; you don’t learn from your successes, you learn from the failures.”
Over the course of three days, about 25 medics from the Monroe Fire Department each spent a day at Bethesda North Hospital in Montgomery training on eight high-fidelity mannequins that act and respond like real patients, including being able to talk, display vital signs and simulate breathing, he said.
Rauh, who just finished nurse practitioner school, said this technology is “slowly being integrated into paramedic education” and all the major medical centers and nursing programs have simulators.
“It’s just something that we wanted to embrace here,” he said.
Bethesda North’s simulator has eight human-like “patients,” that include pregnant women, infants, children and adults, said Mike Moyer, program director for the Center for Simulation and Education at TriHealth. The health system has hospitals and medical centers in Butler, Hamilton and Warren counties.
While the paramedics’ skills are honed, the biggest benefit is improving teamwork and communication, Moyer said.
After the hands-on training, the medics review the video of their performance. Moyer said around 98,000 medical errors occur annually, and 70 percent of those are due to communication errors.
“It’s important that everybody’s on the same playing field,” he said.
About 1,300 people a year train on the simulator, which are mostly in-hospital personnel, he said. Eight to 10 EMS divisions of area fire departments also receive training, and at very low or no cost to the departments thanks to grants by the Bethesda Foundation, he said.
“We are trying to really support the community in the best way we can,” Moyer said.
Bethesda Foundation President Andy Swallow said the nonprofit’s vision “is to be recognized as a leader to help promote the health and wellness of our community.”
Early on, there was a commitment to provide training for first responders,” he said. “Now that has evolved to fulfilling the continuing education requirements being mandated on local departments.”
One of the main functions of local governments is to make sure the community is safe and healthy, and with little to no extra cash in local government budgets, Swallow said “we think we can play a role in doing that.”
“The key to good health is the readiness of the first responders, and to be able to give them a national-level of curriculum and training is really important,” he said.
Monroe’s training was completely paid for by the foundation, Rauh said.
Rauh said he’d like to find a grant that would allow Monroe to purchase it’s own simulator, and then be another training ground for area departments.
“(People in the field of medicine) have identified that it is beneficial and we are an extension of that, so it makes perfect sense,” he said of the training.
The state requires 72 hours of training by each paramedic over the course of three years. Monroe paramedics, between certifications, re-certifications, and out-of-house and in-house training, receive around 300 hours of training a year, Rauh said.
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