In today's economic climate maintaining a well trained healthcare and first responder workforce can be a significant challenge. When funding resources are stretched to the maximum, training and education is often a service that gets cut from the budget. Usually what remains are programs that maintain mandatory requirements such as CPR or ACLS and does not meet the advance training and education needs to implement an effective disaster response. Additional risk still remain in the community and having comprehensive plans in place to deal with these threats is only half the battle. Having a well educated, trained and prepared first responder and first receiver workforce is critical to an effective response at all levels.This includes dealing with issues of triage, alternate treatment centers, altered care standards, working with volunteer organization, resource management, DECON, PPE training to protect the healthcare workforce, incident command and the integration of healthcare into a community response system. Balancing the need to be prepared and trained with the challenge of decreased funding sources is significant and requires leaders to rethink how training and exercises are conducted.
Utilizing a variety of technologies, education on disaster response can be delivered to promote an integrated community response system that will maximize available resources, promote communications, build resiliency and improve recovery. However, education alone only meets half the need and does note ensure competency in disaster healthcare or response. Using a novel approach to training, CPCS uses human patient simulation to provide high value training to maximize a safe, realtime, integrated, training environment. Following the military axiom of "train as you would respond, respond as you have trained," first responders and first receivers can training in the actual environments in which they would have to respond and treat victims of a mass casualty event or victims exposed to those special community risk. Physiologically model to respond to treatment, these simulators provide the healthcare team instant feedback to their interventions. Used extensively in initial training of physicians, nurses, EMS personnel and other healthcare providers, they provide a new dynamic to training when utilized outside the classroom. They can be delivered thoughout the continum of the healthcare delivery system, improve communications, patient and provider safety, identify bottlenecks and evaluate policies, procedures and protocols in real-time.
As training dollars become a scare commodity make sure you are getting the most value out of your limited resources. Contact CPCS to see how we can help you with high-value training to meet your training needs for community and hospital preparedness. CPCS can help you identify available resources and/or develop programs that include the integration of adult, pediatric and infant human patient simulators. Whether you are trying to develop your own simulation resource center or if your needs are short-term and require turn-key solutions, CPCS can meet your immediate needs.
For more information contact CPCS at:
941-387-6030 or
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