Azevedo's Learning Styles

Learning Styles

By Michael James Azevedo, Jr. EMT B; Chief, Carmel Fire & Rescue

Greetings fellow EMS providers in the Great State of Maine. I hope you are enjoying the great weather now that the snow has gone and the flooding has gone down. I am just hanging up the 911 phone from a woman whose husband was chasing her with an axe. As police are responding, I am thinking to myself, “how would I treat that?” Better yet, “how would I get the new EMTs in my squad to be comfortable with this amount of trauma?” Thanks to the rapid response of the police, there will be no blood loss tonight. But this is how many of my training ideas get started.

I have the following expectations from this column. As a squad training officer for many years in different departments, I know how challenging training can be. Over the years I have picked up many ideas and put them to use. Some have worked well, and others not so well. The first point I would like to make is that very few of these are my own ideas. They have come from many of you, and been tweaked a little to work in my service. As the number of EMTs decrease in certain areas and the demands and expectations increase, we need to find a creative way to make training more fun, realistic and affordable. I would like to offer your ideas to other training officers, to assist them with the monthly department trainings they offer.

“Train like You Fight, Fight like You Train!”

As a kinesthetic learner, I need to put my hands on something, see it, touch it, take it apart, use it six times, and then maybe, just maybe I will be able to use it. Following the above quote (I heard this from L’Easa at Capital/Brewer), and my learning style, I need to have equipment that I can practice with. And hence my first tip: if you are a Maine licensed ambulance or rescue service, then you already have your training items. Check the required EMS equipment list found on the State of Maine EMS website and you will see that you already have the training equipment you need. Train with the same equipment you will use on calls and you and the patient will both come out ahead.

There are great benefits to using the equipment from your truck, rather than buying training equipment:

1. You guarantee that your members will be familiar with the equipment they will be using in the field.

2. You are able to make sure that the equipment will function properly. If it does not work in training, it will not work in the field. This is a good opportunity to make sure all the pieces are in the bag. (I have opened more KED devices to find the head piece and chin straps missing.)

3. You can make sure the equipment was properly cleaned and maintained the last time it was used. Have you ever pulled something you needed off the truck only to find it contaminated? Yuck.

4. You can make sure your crew knows how and where to put the equipment back into service.

5. It is cheaper as you already have it.

6. When the cabinet is empty is a good chance to clean and disinfect the cabinet. Now that mud season is over, spring cleaning can begin.

I know what you are thinking. What if we get all the equipment off the truck and we get a call? Right, admit it, you were thinking it. First, if you have multiple trucks, or a good mutual aid partner, this is not really a problem. Second, you can usually put stuff back on the truck in a hurry. I generally use only certain equipment at a time for this very reason. My service responds 240 times a year, and generally only about six times a year during training time.

Training exercises need to be practical, realistic and interesting. Please remember that most of your people are not EMTs full time, have children and spouses at home, have full time jobs, church, scouts, baseball and many other activities that take up their time. Please remember that their time is very important, and so is yours.

If you have a practical scenario or training idea that I can borrow or steal and give out to other training officers via this column, please e-mail it to me. Your homework assignment for this quarter is to take one piece of equipment that you are not familiar with, learn all you can about it, and then tell me about it. That way we will both know. Is that not what training is all about?

Until next time, thank you for the people you train and the lives that are saved as a result.