[MUSIC PLAYING]
NARRATOR: EMS professionals know that acting fast saves lives.
Making the right decisions at the right time
during life and death situations requires ongoing training.
It's hard to improve performance
by providing a lecture.
So we started looking at ways to get our street-level personnel
in to practice some of the things
that they may not get to do very often.
NARRATOR: Across the state, providing continued education
for EMS is vital.
The Medical University of South Carolina
offers a unique hour-long simulation session
with four emergency scenarios.
A lot of people like doing simulation.
Paramedics especially like to have hands-on,
so they want to touch the patient or the mannequin.
They want to listen to the lungs.
They want to actually start the IV or do the airway techniques.
And we don't let them do that.
I know this is something different.
NARRATOR: EMS professionals who are stationed across the state
are able to join by video.
This one-of-a-kind setup challenges
the participants' decision-making skills.
Throughout the simulation, participants
direct medical procedures to the on-location facilitators.
What that allows them to do is not
worry about whether they can start the IV
or whether they can get the right airway device in place,
but really just focus on "What do I need to do
to make this patient better.
What medications do they need?
What interventions do they need?
And if that doesn't work, then what's my next step?"
This is something new for us that
allows us to focus on critical thinking.
I am one of the facilitators.
So when crews on the other side of the TV give us a task,
then we will perform it.
MATTHEW: Kelsey, could you get him a baseline set of vitals?
KELSEY: Sure.
There's no point where I felt like I couldn't ask questions,
because I knew on the other side of the camera were two
experienced providers, as well.
So I could ask a question, get the feedback from them,
and then process that information
and make a decision based off of their response.
You have different providers from all over the state that
are coming in.
It's interesting to see the different approach
that people are used to taking.
NARRATOR: This interactive simulation
is just one of the ways Telehealth is increasing access
to quality health care in South Carolina.
With this type of continued education,
EMS can feel more confident about the decisions
they are making when a true emergency strikes.
And what we've done is we've made the scenarios increasingly
difficult as they go along.
Reinforce some of the lessons that we're
trying to teach them.
And between each one we'll do a quick debriefing,
and then at the end we'll do a longer debriefing and a bigger
picture as to what all this means.
And that's really what this is about.
If they didn't do an intervention,
or if they didn't do a timely intervention,
those are things that I want to talk about.
If they did something really well, I want to highlight that.
Any other questions or comments?
The goal wasn't to try to get them to save the mannequin.
It was more to focus on the decision-making
and trying to use the data that they
were getting to improve the mannequin or the patient's
condition.
What's happened over the last 20 years with the advent
of video-conferencing technology and the increase
in the capacity for the web to handle those technologies has
been an expectation that people will be trained and have access
to information, without having to physically transverse time
and geographic spaces.
When you focus on critical thinking like we did today,
I think that is one of the biggest impacts in terms
of saving someone's life.
A lot of times we kind of joke and say, "Well, you
could train a small child to perform the same skills that we
do," but you can't train someone to think critically like that.