The second week of the St. Lucia Fire Service and Global EMS Train-the Trainer Workshop got off to an excellent start. We had additional team members join us including Dr. Valenzuela, a Global Emergency Medicine physician from Stony Brook University who has been working in St. Lucia in combination with Global EMS in November 2019 and Chrissy Boaglio who is a Physician Assistant with experience in obstetrics and gynecology. They both jumped into working with our colleagues at Saint Lucia Fire Service.
The day began with brainstorming ideas to create the protocols for Trauma, as well as skills station training for instruction on the use of a pelvic binder and a torniquet. We concentrated on Stop-the-Bleed content and structured the protocol on a Rapid Exam (RE) of a traumatic injured patient.
Tuesday was dedicated to Obstetrics, and Chrissy’s expertise in obstetrics came in useful as the Fire Service Instructors developed their obstetrics protocols. At mid-day, we introduced a high-fidelity simulation mannequin and an obstetrics mannequin to our SLFS colleagues to improve the training of the treatment protocols on simulated cases.
All of us were eager to train on them. We spent the afternoon demonstrating the use of the mannequins and got a good laugh from Delia’s mock birth scenario as she played the patient in the obstetrics scenario, but the most laughs came from Dr. Unger’s role-playing as a delivering man, while the SLFS instructors alternated as providers and as scenario leaders.
The next day was spent with both the St. Lucia Fire Service Instructors and the Global EMS instructors familiarizing themselves with the high-fidelity mannequin and the Obstetrics mannequin. The aim was to test and train all developed treatment protocols on simulated cases. We split up into two groups and ran through the different scenarios, with everyone able to participate as a scenario leader and as a provider to see how to best use the mannequins.
On Thursday, we continued practicing and refining our scenarios, and we were paid a visit by Dr. Joseph, Senior Medical Officer for the St. Lucia Ministry of Health. Albina Cherubin did a great job representing her colleagues and presented the trauma protocol with expertise. Dr. Joseph was invited to observe the St. Lucia Fire Service run through an obstetrics scenario. He confirmed to support the new treatment protocols at the Ministry of Health and the introduction of certain medications in the protocols.
Finally, we ended the day with a Barbeque. The St. Lucia Fire Service instructors and Global EMS instructors had a great time bonding over cold Piton beers, barbequed chicken, pork, snapper, and box fish, and watched the sunset over some friendly games of dominoes.
On the last day of this productive second week, we divided up into break-out groups, putting the finishing touches on the treatment protocols, on the questions for testing and quizzing, as well as on the case scenarios, and assessment forms to ultimately prepare a two-day training course and a certification process for the EMTs of SLFS.
The mountain of work that was accomplished in these last 10 days became apparent when we noticed that the amount of printed paper was enough to fill a binder completely. We set up the schedule for the training module for the following week to run a pilot course on ourselves and deliver the Training to the EMTs.
…to be continued….
Global EMS 