hinsdale emts receive state-of-the-art training

The Hinsdale Ambulance volunteer emergency medical technicians (EMTs) strive to improve patient care by participating in state of the art training to recently certified and veteran EMTs as well as students. On March, 22, the crew, which included two EMT students, took part in a simulation training event facilitated by Simulation in Motion Montana, a 501c3 non-profit simulation healthcare training organization, based out of Helena, at the Hinsdale Ambulance barn.

During the training, the EMTs took on a patient, a high-fidelity manikin, and practiced skills to better respond to low frequency, high risk events such as brain traumas and cardiac arrest events. The benefit of practicing on this type of manikin allows realism to be brought into the training, which has shown to dramatically improve patient care by providing real life experience on events that rarely occur in the community but do have large impacts when it does occur.

In order to put the actions into practice, the trainer put codes into a computer system to start the simulation, which then allowed the manikin to experience the symptoms for the various health events. "We were able to do an adult and pediatric code as well as skill practice outside of these codes, such as IVs," explained Hinsdale volunteer EMT Gregg Hunter. "Though they brought their own equipment for the trainings, we were able to hook up our own equipment to the manikin, which is the equipment we use everyday, allowing a more real-life experience."

In addition to going through the simulations, the EMTs were also evaluated on their skills, their teamwork, effectiveness of communication and the quality of their medical equipment. Each scenario was followed by a group debrief to allow members to address any mistakes in patient care, any possible communication breakdown and other essential pieces of the medical response. The debrief discussion allowed the participants to uncover opportunities for improvement and to dissect the effectiveness of their collective response in order to improve patient care.

This is not the first time Simulation in Motion Montana has come to the Hi-Line as they have previously done a simulation training once before. Since then the company has been in touch with the Hinsdale Ambulance crew to be able to provide further trainings.

"Dorothy [Jensen] and her team have always been eager to learn and easy to work with. I think our trainings went great with the team. They know they don't see a lot of calls but they want to be ready and that's all you can ask for with any department. It's especially challenging with a volunteer department but they stay vigilant and try to get all the training they can and I don't think most people realize how hard and rare that is getting to be," reflected DJ Olson, simulation team leader of Simulation in Motion Montana. "We are excited to go back soon with something else to train on."

The local news picked up the story to share with their community. You can read all the details here.