SaltWire E-Edition

Simulator sharpens life-saving skills in rural ERS

AARON BESWICK abeswick@herald.ca @chronicleherald

As the 56-year-old man’s vitals continued to decline on Wednesday morning, he slipped in and out of a hazy consciousness.

Dr. Kathryn Binnersley took the man’s wife aside in the Inverness Memorial Consolidated Hospital emergency room and explained that they needed to intubate if he was to be kept alive.

“Should I call the children and get them to come?” the woman asked.

“I think that would be a good idea,” Binnersley, fresh out of her medical residency, told the older woman.

The wife left the bedside, ostensibly to call children who don’t exist.

Because mannequins don’t have children – even if it’s a high-tech emergency room simulator mannequin sporting an excellent toupee.

On Tuesday, the emergency room doctors and nurses and respiratory therapists at Inverness Consolidated were sharpening skills that fortunately don’t have to used as often as in urban settings.

Any skill that isn’t used or regularly practiced can get rusty.

That holds true for emergency rooms where medical professionals must work together in co-ordination to preserve a life under the most stressful of situations.

That’s the motivation behind this emergency simulator touring the emergency rooms of Eastern Nova Scotia.

‘YOU CAN’T LEARN THIS STUFF FROM A BOOK’

“A classroom can only teach you so much,” said respiratory therapist Leanne Macdonald after completing the simulation on Wednesday.

“How you feel in a situation and how you react, you can’t learn this stuff from a book.”

Everyone needs to know not only their own job, but what everyone else’s role is and how to work together when the code blue button on the emergency room wall gets punched.

The simulation is led by Dr. Tania Sullivan, a long-time emergency room doctor who also serves as a site lead at St. Martha’s Regional Hospital in Antigonish.

They’ve been perfecting the simulations over recent years while training staff there.

The goal was always to take it on tour.

Staffing is tight at rural hospitals – the entire staff of an emergency room can’t just be sent away for a training weekend.

“Because if you did that, who would be working?” said Sullivan

“These are all advanced skills that our rural teams have that they don’t, thankfully, have to use a lot … This allows them to maximize their communication, their resuscitation strategies, making sure that they are all feeling up to date and are able to maximize the care of the patient for when that real patient presents.”

SIMULATED SEPSIS

The scenario viewed by Saltwire on Wednesday was of a man suffering from sepsis – a very severe infection which in his case, was brought on by pneumonia.

But like in real-life, Binnersley and her team in the emergency room weren’t told that.

As they fought to stabilize the patients, they had to figure it out from looking at and touching the patient, talking to his partner and what the machines told about his vital signs.

“With a low blood pressure, a fever, someone who looks very unwell, very early, we’re thinking they’re in septic shock,” said Binnersley.

“So, their system is starting to not be able to cope with an overwhelming response to an infection. So we’re going through protocols that have been designed to support someone who is sick in that way.”

Those meant fluids and drugs that squeeze his imaginary blood vessels to raise his blood pressure and ease the heart’s work supplying the brain. They meant starting antibiotics and inserting a breathing tube to ensure oxygen entered the immensely complex system that is a failing body.

Each step had to be co-ordinated and timed precisely on the fly.

Within minutes, the beeping machines calmed down, blood pressure came up, breathing strengthened and a ‘man’ who was dying was hauled back from the brink.

Relief, like a sigh, could be felt in the emergency room.

Because next time, the children getting called from out in the hallway won’t be imaginary.

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2023-01-28T08:00:00.0000000Z

2023-01-28T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://saltwire.pressreader.com/article/281616719504161

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