By Channing Rucks
The Oskaloosa Herald
OSKALOOSA, Iowa 鈥� First responders serving Mahaska County and the local area brushed up on their emergency medical skills Friday morning with the help of a team of instructors and specialized equipment from the University of Iowa.
鈥淧art of our trauma certification requires that we provide some education, not just to our hospital first responder staff, but also to local community first responders,鈥� said Mahaska Health Education Coordinator Michelle Williams. 鈥淒oing some research to try to find things to do for that, I stumbled upon University of Iowa鈥檚 website for Simulation Iowa and some videos to see kind of what that was, and reached out to them and said 鈥楬ow do we bring this to Mahaska County ?鈥欌��
Simulation in Motion-Iowa (SIM-IA) is a mobile lab that provides on-hand training for various emergency medical scenarios using mobile simulation trucks that recreate health scenarios in mock-up versions of the back of an ambulance. Trainees can then work through medical scenarios with instructors on hand to guide them as they tackle medical emergencies they might one day be faced with in real life.
First responders from Mahaska Health, the Mahaska County Sheriff鈥檚 Department, the Oskaloosa Police Department and the Oskaloosa Fire Department participated in the training during the roughly four hours one of the simulation trucks spent parked in Mahaska Health鈥檚 parking lot.
鈥淚t鈥檚 a very high-tech simulated training environment,鈥� said Zack Myers, of the Oskaloosa Fire Department. 鈥淵ou鈥檝e got two different bays you can utilize. One simulates an ambulance, like the back of an ambulance, and then the other simulates an emergency room. So it鈥檚 nice to get the two different environments that we may see ourselves in as EMTs.鈥�
鈥淭hey can create so many different scenarios with the mannequins they have, because those mannequins are very high-tech,鈥� Myers added. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e not just your simple CPR mannequins that you breathe into. These ones you can see the pupils dilate. You can get a pulse, and some of them, you can hear lung sounds. You can hear abdominal noises. All sorts of stuff. And you can practice with the different skills and stuff that we do, as far as adjuncts like controlling airways, securing airways, suctioning. They even have ones that you can perform [tracheostomies] on.鈥�
Myers says training opportunities like the one provided Friday through SIM-IA and Mahaska Health are 鈥渋nvaluable.鈥�
鈥淎ny training that we can get is extremely valuable, especially since most of [ Osky Fire鈥檚 EMTs] are fairly new EMTs. We don鈥檛 have a whole lot of experience in the medical field, so any as close to real-life training experience that we can get is incredibly useful and incredibly wanted.鈥�
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