First-year medical students pass important milestone

September, 2015

First-year medical students took their first steps towards providing practical treatment to patients as they learned first responder skills in the WCMC-Q Clinical Skills Center.

Working with standardized patients and medical training models, the students learned how to dress wounds, put patients in splints and slings, provide artificial ventilation and immobilize and safely remove injured people from danger using a spinal board, among other practical skills.

The series of training workshops was led by Dr. Andrea Li, instructor in medicine at WCMC-NY. Students first heard a variety of lectures about the skills demanded of first responders before they took part in six practical workshops that allowed them to get hands-on experience of providing treatment.

In addition to teaching the practical skills required to give treatment, the workshops also demonstrated how to gather information from patients to determine the nature and severity of their injuries, and how to pass information to the emergency services effectively. The students used medical models to practice giving both bag-valve and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, while one workshop involved a role-play scenario in which the students had to coordinate a response to a large-scale disaster that had left hundreds of people wounded.

Dr. Steve Scott, associate dean for student affairs, said that getting hands-on experience early in their training was invaluable to the students.

He said: “They may be only at the start of their medical training but we want them to get practical experience as soon as possible. Not only is this good for their education, but it begins to develop their professional identities and they start to really think of themselves as doctors. The essential skills the students are learning today provide a great foundation for the rest of their training.”

The day-long First Responder course is an annual event in the WCMC-Q calendar and is followed the next day by an Objective Structured Clinical Skills Evaluation (OSCE), which requires each student assume the role of a first responder and tend to an ill standardized patient.

The First Responder course marks an important moment in the training of WCMC-Q students as one of their earliest clinical experiences.

Sonia Allouch said the scenarios had dealt with medical emergencies including a large-scale disaster, a seizure, an allergic reaction, a potential spinal injury requiring immobilization, a fractured bone and a respiratory emergency requiring the students to perform mouth-to-mouth.

Sonia said: “I think the most enjoyable one was the immobilization of the whole body in case of a fracture in the neck or spinal cord. I had an idea about what to do in the other scenarios but that one was completely new to me. You’ve heard about it before but I found out exactly how and why you do what you have to do. It was really intriguing.”

As with the other first year med students, this was Sonia’s first time practicing what she has been taught.

“I’ve been to the hospital for observerships before but it was never like this. Before we were just shadowing the doctors but this time we were the doctors.”