Training for wilderness emergencies

Residents compete in simulated patient-care scenarios

On May 5, 2016, the UC Irvine Department of Emergency Medicine participated in the annual wilderness medicine conference day with the emergency medicine residency programs of San Diego Naval Medical Center and Kaiser Permanente San Diego Medical Center.

This wilderness medicine conference centered around residents navigating a field course at San Onofre State Beach, reacting to several simulated patient-care scenarios, demonstrating team work, improvisation and survival knowledge at skills stations.

Teams competed against each other by completing the course quickly, by earning points for appropriate patient care and by answering 45 multiple choice fund-of-knowledge questions correctly.

When approaching a simulated patient-care scenario, members of each team had to work together and they were limited to using only the medical equipment they could carry with them to assess and treat the patient.

All teams successfully completed the course this year. First place went to a team from the naval medical center.

This is the fourth consecutive year that UC Irvine and the San Diego Naval Medical Center have collaborated on this training opportunity, and the second year that Kaiser has participated.

At right, a team member saws off a portion of an object that has impaled a simulated patient in one of the scenarios.