Where in the World of EMS is (Flat) A.J. Heightman?

It’s not yet noon and I’ve got my finger poking through the side of a sow, knuckle deep. The large surgical lamps are beating down upon me and the other five members of my group and, combined with the assortment of protective gear we’re wearing, we’re—well, sweating like pigs. The lung at my fingertip continues to expand and fall as we imagine it belongs to a man who just fell from a third-story window. Ten minutes prior, it belonged to a geriatric man who’d crashed his motorcycle. Before that, our swine was a woman ejected from her vehicle during a crash. This is all part of the porcine lab conducted at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) for the paramedics at Montgomery County Hospital District (MCHD) in Texas. Pigs are anesthetized and placed in different scenarios for the paramedics to respond and react to while a BCM resident monitors the vital signs to ensure the animal never feels a thing. MCHD Clinical Services Manager Jordan Anderson, Medical Director Robert Dickson, and Quality Coordinator Kevin Crocker with the system’s first simple thoracostomy save. It’s a level of training that can only come from working on a living, breathing creature. In the first scenario, our patient has been deeply cut in four areas and she’s hemorrhaging fast. The crew is soaking up blood with 4x4s but the fear of her exsanguinating is too real. And that’s where this training lab excels. It’s one thing to teach a medic how to pack a wound with QuikClot, but it’s anoth...
Source: JEMS Patient Care - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: Patient Care Training Source Type: news