Training in Pediatric Life Support
9 am: A class in Advanced Pediatric Life Support Begins
A half-mile away, on the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center's Oak Campus, Tom LeMaster, RN, manager of emergency medical services (EMS) education in the Division of Emergency Medicine, and a team of EMS educators are beginning a class in pediatric advanced life support for a group of paramedics.
The training session will be as real as possible, thanks to a remarkable piece of technology — the pediatric human patient simulator. A robot.
The robot is a life-sized simulated child. It looks like a 5-year-old boy and acts like one — at least for medical purposes.
It has a pulse, a heartbeat. It can talk (with help from an instructor at a microphone in an adjacent room). Thanks to sophisticated computer programming, it can simulate many types of pediatric emergencies, and it responds to treatment the way a real child does, in real time.
Physicians, nurses and paramedics have all benefited from training using this teaching tool.
The training session is built around a real-time simulation of an emergency situation. LeMaster sets the scene: It's a chilly November day. The life squad has been called to a near drowning. Neighbors have pulled a young boy out of a pond and started CPR.
The paramedics start to assess the child's condition and find him unresponsive, with a slow heartbeat. Soon his condition worsens; he goes into cardiac arrest. They work as a team, coached by their instructors, who ask questions and offer tips.
Warm him up. Get an oxygen mask and start bagging. Let's try chest compressions. Someone start an IV. Should we defibrillate? How's he doing?
The exercise has the urgency of real life. It gives the paramedics a unique opportunity to practice skills that need to be sharp should they really be called to transport a drowning child to the hospital.
