Teaching first aid procedures at the school and college level could greatly alter the way people respond to emergency situations and result in more lives saved.
If a friend, or even a stranger, is fighting for life beside you, how many of you can do the bare minimum that could keep the person alive until professional medical care could be provided? How many of you are familiar with emergency resuscitation procedures, or more simply, first aid?
Surely not many students can stand up to be counted, what with first aid lessons being consigned to a few illustrations in textbooks in the country. However, with emergency medicine gaining sufficient prominence, several private institutions have started setting up training rooms with mannequins. By simulating real-life situations, doctors, nurses, paramedics and students are encouraged to learn how to handle emergency procedures such as resuscitation, and incidents such as choking and heart failure. Of late, private institutions have begun training even lay people to provide basic life support to prevent unavoidable loss of life. After the first aid procedures the patient is rushed to a hospital for further treatment.
At Sri Ramachandra University in Chennai, the emergency medicine department uses mannequins to teach students using case history. Emergency situations are simulated and the students who take the course are required to function as they would during a real emergency. The university is in the process of acquiring simulated mannequins which could be used for advanced training purposes, says T.V. Ramakrishnan, head of Clinical Services at the Department of Accident and Emergency Medicine.
“What do you do when a person suddenly collapses? You cannot merely stand around and wring your hands. Since 2005 the guidelines for resuscitation have changed. By just continuing the chest compression you could save a life,” N. Ramakrishnan explains. Associated with the Academy for Clinical Training (TACT) in Anna Nagar, he has been training medical students, postgraduate doctors, nurses and paramedics for the past six months. The professionals spend several hours or days depending upon the course and get hands-on experience in treating serious conditions.
The training includes working on a life-size mannequin that is simulated to mimic real-life critical situations in hospitals. The simulated mannequin (Sim Man) is attached to an electrocardiogram machine. A camera in the room allows the tutor to adjust the Sim Man’s ‘actions’, monitoring and manipulating it through a computer in the next room. A trainee can even learn to study the pulse and the heart beat rate using the mannequin.
“We can make a situation difficult or easy depending on the trainee’s skill level,” says Akila Janardhanam, associate director, Clinical Education. “For instance, if a doctor finds it easy to insert a tube into the trachea during an emergency procedure then we make it a little difficult for him by manipulating the Sim Man’s jaws. This can happen in a real life situation as is common in emergency rooms.”
The same technique could be used for teaching delivery for obstetrics students and paramedics by using a female mannequin. TACT also teaches healthcare professionals skills such as treating gangrene, dressing burns and emergency life-saving techniques such as cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
The academy’s ‘Save a life, give a life’ project is for ordinary people who are taught basic life support skills to enable them to manage till they get formal help. A couple of city schools including the nursery section of SBOA in Anna Nagar have sent their teachers for training. “Children could choke on objects and the teacher may be the first to know of it,” Dr. Akila says.
While private hospitals have begun using mannequins, in government-run medical institutions, the focus is on using senior faculty to teach the trainee doctors. The hospitals put the students in a team who learn by watching their seniors. “They would have already learnt about the procedures in theory,” explained a former government hospital dean.
Following the tsunami, the department of Orthopaedic Surgery of Madras Medical College has evolved a procedure for emergency response by a hospital, much on the lines of such procedures followed in the West.
Emergency medicare personnel are also of the opinion that unless first aid procedures are taught to students right at the school and college level, it is unlikely that we make a significant change in the way the society responds to emergency situations — helping to save more lives. |
