By Jennifer Brown
The Denver Post
Copyright 2006 The Denver Post
Disbelief evaporates on the welcome mat of 911 Innovation Avenue.
From the minute paramedic students ring the doorbell and step inside this staged house at the Community College of Aurora, they push aside common sense telling them it’s only make-believe.
And the green-shuttered house with the red geranium out front is so real — from the movies stacked next to the VCR to the shampoo in the bathtub — it’s easy for students to forget it’s only a drill and that the patient complaining of chest pain is actually a $50,000 dummy.
“You really do see them start to sweat, and they shake and their voice gets shaky, which is a really amazing thing for me to experience as an educator,” said Bob Matoba, director of the emergency medical provider program.
The Aurora college, among the first in the nation to throw paramedic students into the drama of what looks like a Hollywood set, is one of the leaders in a new era of training emergency medical technicians.
“It’s cutting edge for us,” said Angel Clark Burba, president-elect of the National Association of EMS Educators in Pittsburgh. “You can do some very realistic things. You can put on makeup. You can have the patient moan and groan.”
Aurora’s program — which includes a plan to build a street-cafe scene and a cluttered single-wide trailer — could become a premier training ground for EMTs, Burba said.
Aurora’s $150,000 house at the former Lowry Air Force Base has plaid couches and wooden tables. An ambulance, found at an Arizona fire department that totaled the framework, is parked outside the back door.
Two high-fidelity mannequins — including Kyle, who wears jeans and Adidas gym shoes — blink, breathe and say things like, “Doc, I feel like I’m dying.” They adapt to blood pressure and breathing symptoms the instructor enters in a computer.
Students are on their own — there is no teacher in the house to help them if they forget a dosage or how to insert a breathing tube. Instructors watch the scene through cameras.
Sometimes, the students kill the mannequins.
“In the field, you don’t even want to try things because of the repercussions,” said Greg Metzel, a premed student at the University of Denver who is training to become a paramedic at CCA so he can “work the streets and the ER.”
Students shadow paramedics as part of their certification program, but they say the real emergencies are so intense they rarely get to touch anything.
Jaime Sharkey, another student in the two-year, $6,000 program, is a self-professed “trauma junkie” who thrives on the “rush you get when somebody needs you.”
She faked a broken hip in a recent drill as three of her classmates tried to figure out what was wrong, load her onto a stretcher and into an ambulance.
“Where’s your pain?” Metzel asked with intensity after finding Sharkey groaning on the living room floor.
Aurora program directors are beginning a first-of-its-kind, 10-year study to determine whether students who run drills in simulated reality are more competent medics than those who learn in conventional classrooms.
Matoba is sure the answer is yes, and the college is set to open its second simulation room in the fall. This one, a collaboration with the film department, is a sidewalk scene similar to 16th Street Mall.
Future projects include a trailer filled with junk in the college’s parking lot and a studio that can transform into several real-life spaces, such as a business office or a warehouse.
Instructors say the drills make it easier to evaluate students, plus they can record the simulations for critiques.
“Within the first week of a new class we can say, ‘This one is really going to struggle,”’ instructor Ken Forinash said.
Aurora’s simulation room, which opened last year, “would rival anything I’ve ever seen nationally,” said Randy Kuykendall, chief of emergency medical and trauma services at the state Department of Public Health and Environment.
And the need is high for paramedics in Colorado, where 11,000 of the 14,000 EMTs are at the basic level and not trained in the advanced skills of paramedics, Kuykendall said. Paramedic is the highest level of EMT, above basic and intermediate.
At the Aurora Fire Department, for example, there aren’t enough paramedics to meet a department goal of two responders for every 9-1-1 call, said EMS bureau manager Kevin Waters.
College instructors insist that simulated reality is the best way to turn out well-trained paramedics who won’t mess up at the expense of public safety.
“We’d rather have them make their mistakes here than in the field,” Forinash said. “We have to teach them to intervene in a life crisis and to turn that crisis around in a matter of seconds.”