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 persons can stand up to be counted, what with first aid lessons being consigned to a few illustrations in text books.
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. 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.
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.
Medical students, post graduate doctors, nurses and paramedics are being trained in this field. The training includes working on a life-sized 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 situation can be made difficult or easy depending on the trainee’s skill level. For instance, if a doctor finds it easy to insert a tube into the trachea during an emergency procedure then it is made a little difficult for him by manipulating the Sim Man’s jaws. This can happen in real life situation as is common in emergency rooms.
In some schools certain teachers are sent for training because children could choke on objects and the teachers may be the first to know of it.
While private hospitals have begun using mannequins, in government-run medical institutions, the focus is on using senior faculty to teach the trainee doctors. 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.