Wildwood Park in Greenville served as the perfect setting for “Emergency Medicine Wilderness Day” as ECU Health emergency medicine residents practiced assessing and treating a variety of common outdoor ailments including altitude sickness, lightning strikes, falls from trees and more.
On March 29, approximately 20 emergency medicine residents attended training and worked in small groups to run through simulated injury scenarios with real people. From knowing how to stabilize an injured person, to assessing injuries and helping get them to safety, emergency residents worked together to treat the injuries under the watchful eye of experienced faculty members from the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University. Residents received real-time instruction and feedback from faculty as they worked through their training.
Standardized patients from Brody’s Office of Clinical Skills Assessment and Education acted as the patients in each scenario. Standardized patients are trained to mimic real patients so that students can learn. Their role is to help prepare future health care professionals for a variety of patient interfaces.
“There are a number of practical applications for this type of training, especially for our medical residents who get to test their knowledge in the field,” said Dr. Jennifer Bennett, an emergency medicine physician at ECU Health and clinical assistant professor of emergency medicine at Brody. “These scenarios are the types of things that we, as emergency medicine physicians, address somewhat commonly. We can apply the knowledge and skills learned out here to patient care.”
The day was a success, according to Dr. Bennett, who helped create the simulation Emergency Medicine Wilderness Day training event last year alongside Dr. Jennifer Parker-Cote, assistant professor of emergency medicine at Brody. Both doctors helped organize the Wilderness Day, coming up with unique patient scenarios, including the altitude sickness training station which featured a standardized patient acting as a distressed hiker. The residents removed a fake snake from the area, asked the patient questions about their medications and medical history, moved the patient to a lower area and helped get them to further medical care.
“It’s always nice to get outdoors instead of sitting in a lecture hall,” said emergency medicine resident Tyler Ruchti, DO. “When you’re in the hospital, you have all of your tools and all of your equipment and know where it is, and when we come out here and do things like this it’s a change of scenery. You have to think outside the box.”
The training is another example of the valued partnership between ECU Health and Brody. Residents at an academic health system like ECU Health have support and resources for continued education from faculty and the Interprofessional Clinical Simulation Program at Brody, enriching their clinical training experience. Residents are able to participate in trainings like this to prepare for real situations with real patients both behind the walls of the hospital and out in the community.
“This training was partially about simulating complex medical issues that you may encounter in the wilderness as well as providing a little wellness for our residents,” said Dr. Parker-Cote. “This is a fun way to test knowledge and work together as a team. When it comes to education, there are different modalities for teaching. Learning in this type of environment provides us another way of reinforcing the knowledge they have learned throughout their residency, and it prepares them to help their fellow community members no matter the situation.”
Resources
