Medical Education & Research Institute

The University of Memphis (UM), Wright State University National Center for Medical Readiness (NCMR), and the Medical Education and Research Institute (MERI) has developed a training program to ensure effective interface between civilian and military operations in the event of a catastrophe requiring aeromedical evacuation. The civilian aeromedical evacuation sustainment (CAEST) training will complement existing military training and will prepare civilian nursing, allied health, public health, and emergency responder personnel to appropriately assess and prepare patients in pre-hospital austere environments and in hospital or other clinical patient collection sites for aeromedical evacuation. Going beyond traditional community first responder training and health system and community disaster management planning, we will address significant issues associated with operations and practice differences between civilian and military systems, such as communications, medical triage, and patient evacuation and transfer protocols and provide hands-on experiences via disaster exercises.

This medical readiness course is free to all healthcare providers, disaster management teams and hospital administrators both military and civilian.

The course is delivered at MERI both days. 8:00 am – 4:30 pm for the first day and 8:00 am – 12:30 pm on the second day. This is the link for registration website:

https://epay.wright.edu/C21810_ustores/web/store_main.jsp?STOREID=4&SINGLESTORE=true

Suggested Prerequisites: ICS 100 & ICS 200
http://www.fema.gov/emergency/nims/NIMSTrainingCourses.shtm

Dates for the Civilian Aeromedical Evacuation Sustainment Training (CAEST) are listed below:

Course dates for 2011:

• December 6-7, 2011

Course Dates for 2012:

• January 10-11, 2012
• February 7-8, 2012
• February 21-22, 2012
• March 13-14, 2012
• March 27-28, 2012
• April 10-11, 2012
• April 24-25, 2012

Please contact Shirley R. Brown, RN,MSN, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or 901-674-4560, for any questions.

According to the Center for Medical Simulation in Cambridge, MA, Medical Simulation is a situation or environment created to allow persons to experience a representation of a real event for the purpose of practice, learning, evaluation, testing, or to gain understanding of systems or human actions.

I recall my first week at the MERI (Medical Education & Research Institute). I was walking through our Simulation Center and heard iStan PediaSIM NOELLE® and Newborn HAL® breathing and saw their eyes blinking. Their rooms were and are still setup to look and feel just like a patient room at a hospital. Everything was just like you’d imagine it. Patient charts are on their room doors, white boards and vital sign monitors on walls, boxes of latex gloves and hand santizer are strategically placed as you walk in. It looks quite real, but still I was skeptical. How could these robot looking mannequins be of any real value to a surgeon or a nurse?

Let me tell you how wrong I was. Over the past 14 months I have seen MERI’s simulators save lives! Last November after attending a Difficult Airway Management course at the MERI, Donna Hunn, APN, a nurse practitioner at Methodist Le Bonheur successfully intubated and resuscitated a patient who had stopped breathing. “The intubation course that Methodist and MERI offered gave me invaluable hands on experience that cannot be duplicated with a mannequin,” said Hunn. “Had I not attended the course, I would not have had the confidence or skill to intubate the patient I found who was not breathing.”

Even more recently, through a Plough Foundation grant with matching funds from the Department of Homeland Security, MERI has teamed up with the Metropolitan Medical Response System (MMRS) to train first responding EMS and Fire Fighters in a simulated search and rescue bombing scenario. In this case the victims were MERI’s simulators that required assessment, triage and emergency care. “There are a whole lot of skill sets used,” said Joe Holley, Medical Director for the Emergency Medical Services in Shelby County. “They’re learning to manage a scene, make sure their own people are safe and conduct those live-saving interventions on victims.

MERI’s simulators are used almost daily to teach to teach patient safety, tough medical decision making, working in teams, and planned experience of rare events. Nursing students and physicians frequently get training on basic assessment, postoperative care, and skills practice in respiratory and pulmonary procedures. The simulators breath, bleed, urinate, have eyes that dilate, a pulse and a heartbeat. Those treating them have the power to save their lives or send them into cardiac arrest. The simulator’s human patient simulation technology not only mimics symptoms but also responds directly to treatment administered by trainees including oxygen, intravenous drugs and defibrillation. These complex machines can simulate hundreds of medical scenarios wirelessly from a computer.

Am I skeptical now? NO WAY!

Source: Commercial Appeal
By Toby Sells
Posted April 27, 2010

A package delivery driver was hit by a car last week. His heart stopped at the scene.

He was brought to Baptist Memorial Hospital-Memphis, where he was shocked back to life with a defibrillator. His condition finally stabilized, but he needed an overnight stay in the emergency room.

Most of that really didn’t happen. The patient’s job and the car accident were made up and the “patient” wasn’t a real person, but rather a pricey, high-tech simulator.

The defibrillator shocks, however, were very real — part of a training regimen designed to help medical professionals sharpen their skills.

The simulator, one of five at Baptist’s new Simulation Center, is a SimMan 3G mannequin, a completely wireless, life-sized human model designed to mimic the symptoms of just about any injury or ailment that would befall a real person.

The mannequins can cough, cry, vomit, blink, urinate, talk, sweat, show a pulse, respond to medications, have overdoses and seizures and do just about anything else a real patient can do.

The 3,600-square-foot Simulation Center, scheduled to open May 13, will have five patient rooms equipped to simulate nearly every patient service area in the hospital — childbirth, pediatrics, critical care, general medical and emergency.

The center was established with an $815,000 grant from the Baptist Foundation, with the rest funded by the hospital. The total cost of the project was not disclosed.

Everything about the center, besides the mannequins, is real, including the room size and the medical equipment and supplies. So, when Baptist’s new nurses are training or its veterans are sharpening their skills, they are not allowed to use the “p” word.

” ‘Pretend’ is a word we don’t use in here,” said Judy Bedard, Baptist’s director of staff development and a registered nurse. “We want you to simulate everything.”

Bedard said Baptist began training on mannequins in 2004, but that the new simulation center is a major step forward in that sort of training.

“There is just a lot of complexity now in just taking care of the basic situations and equipment and medications,” she said.

The Medical Education and Research Institute has been using simulators for two years, said Elizabeth Ostric, its executive director.

“We see how much (the simulators) help students at every level, whether you’re an experienced caregiver or one who is learning to become a caregiver,” Ostric said. “We see that allowing people to demonstrate their competence increases their confidence.”

The institute teaches simulated courses on advanced life support, restricted airways and many courses for paramedics in Shelby County.

Baptist’s Bedard said simulators have been around for about 10 years and have been used for years by the military and in academia, but have just recently caught on in hospital settings.

She said each of the hospital’s new high-tech mannequins cost about $65,000.

“But what they provide in the learning environment, they’re worth much more than that,” she said.

On Friday, April 23, Congressman Marsha Blackburn visited the MERI school to learn more about simulated hands-on training for physicians, nurses,

CRNAs, nurse anesthetists, Paramedics, EMTs, and other healthcare professionals. She was able to observe a simulated OB event and learn about the various uses of simulated hands-on training for healthcare professionals.

She observed a Paramedic Disaster drill and saw first hand the advantages of simulated trauma scenarios and how realistic the training can be. She was able to talk with Paramedics and educators and learned how valuable hands-on simulated training is to improving their skills and their ability to positively impact patient safety.

Congressman Blackburn observed hands-on training labs with physicians using anatomic donors and heard first hand from training coordinators how valuable hands-on training is to ensure that physicians are trained properly to perform minimally invasive surgical procedures.