Published Sunday, March 2, 2003
simulates
real illnesses
By Erin Palko
Herald Staff Writer
Local paramedics and emergency medical technicians recently got to hone their life-saving skills on a very willing volunteer.
His name is Sim Man, and he visited UPMC Horizon's Farrell and Greenville hospitals in January in the UPMC Health Van.
Sim Man is a patient simulator manufactured by the Laerdal Corp. that can mimic the symptoms of a real patient for training purposes.
The training involves placing Sim Man in a real-life scenario and then letting the EMS workers treat him.
"It's a state-of-the art human simulator," said Venard J. Campbell, EMS education outreach specialist with UPMC prehospital care. "We are re-creating high-resolution, low frequency cases, or cases that don't happen very often but are life-threatening."
During the training session, the paramedics and EMTs were closed into the front section of the van with Sim Man, while Campbell controlled him with a laptop computer in the back of the van. Closed circuit television monitors located in other areas of the van provided a view of the EMS workers.
"We can create a scenario and allow the paramedic to assess and treat the patient," Campbell said. "An airline pilot has to put so many hours in an airplane simulator. We can do the same thing with paramedics so they will be prepared. They will know exactly what to do."
Sim Man has a pulse, blood pressure and lung and bowel sounds. He can cough and gag. He can even talk.
His jaw can clench and his tongue can swell, making inserting a breathing tube difficult. These are situations paramedics face every day.
"We can do anything we would do on a person. We can put him on a heart monitor, and we can do a live defibrillation," Campbell said. "Things will happen that will happen on a real call."
Although the UPMC Health Van is in demand and has a large area to cover, including most of the counties surrounding Pittsburgh, Campbell said he hopes the van will make quarterly visits to the Mercer County area.
If the EMS workers learn a little about difficult emergency situations and make fewer mistakes in the future, their time spent with Sim Man in the UPMC Health Van is worthwhile, they said.
"We make sure the paramedics leave with a positive experience," Campbell said. "We want them to leave here knowing a little bit more than what they knew when they came in. At the end of the day we want them to be a little bit better than they were."
Campbell said UPMC began working with Sim Man's maker Laerdal Corp. about a year and a half ago to bring patient simulators to its hospitals.
"We wanted to bring simulation training to the prehospital setting to curtail medical errors," Campbell said. "We decided to build a simulation lab at the emergency department" in UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh.
But that situation wasn't feasible.
"We were about to break ground and decided, if we build this, will people come? Would they want to come to Oakland? Would they come to do simulation training?" Campbell said. "We decided: We've got to put this thing on wheels."
So, the UPMC Health Van was born, thanks to a $125,000 grant from the Pittsburgh Emergency Medicine Foundation. The van primarily serves three functions.
It is used as a wellness initiative to bring such services as flu vaccines and stroke screenings into the community and makes rounds to career days at schools.
Its second function is disaster response. Many residents of Clark may remember seeing the van in the borough during the first week after the Nov. 10 tornado.
The third function is simulation training for paramedics and EMTs. When the van is used for this purpose, Sim Man rides along.
Dr. Jeffrey Moldovan, medical director of emergency services at UPMC Horizon; John Libonati, manager of prehospital care services, and Matt Chulpka, EMS specialist, helped bring the UPMC Health Van to Mercer County to train paramedics and EMTs from McGonigle Ambulance Service in Sharon, Life Force in Greenville, Rural/Metro Ambulance in Farrell and Hermitage, Superior Ambulance Service in Grove City and Brookfield firefighters.