Staff trains to save lives
Emergency personnel get advanced life support education to ensure quality of care
Casey Lessard
Northern News Services
Monday, April 13, 2015
IQALUIT
As Steve Scott eats lunch at Qikiqtani General Hospital, a man sitting near him starts choking and loses consciousness. The Iqaluit emergency worker jumps into action, starting abdominal thrusts to try to clear the man's airway. The food comes out, but the man collapses.
As others join in to help the man, Scott takes the lead and asks, "does he have a pulse?"
This scenario is just a test, one of many scenarios doctors, nurses, and other emergency workers drilled through over two days last month in Iqaluit. The Advanced Cardiac Life Support program saw 12 first responders hone their skills to benefit those needing assistance in Iqaluit.
"I've been in code (crisis) situations, and they're so scary," said emergency room nurse Sandy Schwartz, who graduated from Nunavut Arctic College two years ago and was taking the course for the first time.
"This makes me more confident to go into my next code situation and I have a clearer understanding of what I'm doing."
The class, led by Keewatin Air educator Irene Pare, throws complicated and multi-layered situations at the students, situations that are not likely to have a variety of problems happening at once in real life.
"People need to know that their (emergency) staff are very qualified, and that they have gone to this extra length to provide the best care to the public," Pare said.
The focus of the course is getting a heart going again through advanced care, including electrical shocks and drugs.
"We follow an algorithm, basically a recipe of what to do," she said. "Everybody can follow a recipe, but they need to know why they're doing it. Sometimes it may not work, so you have to do it three or four times. And that's augmented by some drugs that we give."
Anyone working in an emergency department needs the training, which requires recertification every two years.
Schwartz said she was ready to learn after spending time in the ER facing such situations as part of a team. The training gives her and her colleagues, who were fellow students, the ability to take the lead if necessary.
"Especially in an emergency department, you see a lot of (physically) unstable people, and that can come from accidents, trauma with a lot of blood loss, a stroke or heart attack," she said.
"You need to know this process that you go through step by step, the recipe for saving someone's life. You can read it all in a book and know all these concepts and theories, but until you have the practice in a team setting, you really don't know what to do with your information."
