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CARE program improves skills of local medical professionals

Comprehensive Approaches to Rural Emergency course returns to Clearwater
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By Jaime Polmateer

The Comprehensive Approaches to Rural Emergency (CARE) course made its way back to the Dr. Helmcken Memorial Hospital recently, helping grow the skills of 27 paramedics, nurses and doctors from Clearwater and Valemount.

The course makes its rounds to rural hospitals in B.C. every two years or so, improving the abilities of medical professionals and helping them learn to work better both individually and as a team.

“The CARE course comes into the community and we always teach the paramedics, nurses and the docs all together, ideally in their own facility, so they’re learning in the facility where they work and with the teams they work with,” said Dr. Jel Coward, course director for the program.

“We’re covering all aspects of emergency care from pediatric and cardiac care to people having babies and adults having severe injuries, and learning how to manage those things as individual skills, but also learning to look after patients as groups.”

Coward added participants spend half the time in the course learning particular skills and the other half of the time running practical patient simulations.

As for the team building aspect of the program, CARE aims to help paramedics, nurses and doctors better understand one another’s role in managing an emergency call, so they can integrate better as a unit and improve the handing off of patients.

“Patient care starts to become more joined up from the pre-hospital setting, where the ambulance comes, to coming into the emergency room to meet the nurse, then to have the doctors involved—by working and learning together, that part of their care improves hugely,” said Coward.

“Then the individual parts of the patient care they do, like looking after someone with a heart attack for example, all those things are brought up together; the team-working that (participants) learn makes the care more joined up and it makes more sense—it’s safer and better—and then the individual skills also improve the quality of care patients get.”

Another noteworthy aspect of the CARE course is its taught to rural professionals by fellow rural professionals, focusing on the types of situations more suited outside an urban setting, while also using the equipment on-hand at the hospitals it visits.

Sharon Mah, communications manager with the Rural Coordination Centre of B.C., said the course is specifically designed this way to make sure it’s as rurally relevant as possible.

“(They’re not going to teach things) like, ‘If somebody falls off a high-rise, what do you do?’ Because that’s not often a situation that’s found in a rural community, but they’ll often train people on things like, what happens when you get stomped on by a cow?,” she said, as a hypothetical example.

“It sounds funny, but it’s completely relevant; these aren’t the kinds of injuries you see in the city.”

The course also travels to the places the medical professionals practise in, so participants aren’t removed from the communities while they take the two-day program.

Mah added other courses similar to CARE require participants to go to bigger centres like Prince George and Vancouver, and in cases like that a replacement has to be brought in, or other professionals in the community have to provide the additional coverage, taking on an added burden while the participant is off taking the course.

As for Clearwater and Valemount, Coward said he feels residents are in good hands after having observed local professionals tackle the course.

“The teams of doctors, nurses and paramedics here are fantastic; they’ve been working really hard for two days and they have good energy and a really good professional approach to their work,” he added.

“The patient care that we’ve seen them giving in the patient simulations really is just fantastic and I think Clearwater and Valemount are both very lucky communities to have the folks they have here—they’re so dedicated to what they do and they do a really good, high-quality job.”



newsroom@clearwatertimes.com

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