Cascade County Disaster & Emergency Services conducted training for their EMT students about their part as first responders to the scene of crash, and communicating with fire rescue.
Vaughn and Montana Air National Guard fire departments, EMT class instructors, and volunteer patients came together to demonstrate vehicle extrication, the process of removing a patient from a vehicle after a crash.
Lead instructor of the EMT class, Colin Campbell, says, “They're going to roll up on scene, they're going to see a crash. And they need to know, as an EMT, what they can do before fire gets there to start working on cutting a patient out of a vehicle."
The demonstration was part of the first EMT certification course through Cascade County DES, which involves 150 hours of hands-on learning.
Campbell says, “We wanted to provide a course that's going to give us, as a county, the best resources we can get out in the field to help the community."
In the demonstration, two patients were trapped in a vehicle. EMTs arrived on the scene and began assessing the patient’s conditions, and reporting back to the en route fire rescue team.
They also began planning the best way to get the patient’s out of the vehicle. Once fire rescue arrived, they used tools to remove the doors and roof of the vehicle, allowing EMTs to get the patients out and prepare them for transport to the hospital.
Family nurse practitioner and medical director at the Cascade County Health Department Pauline Conway is one of the EMT class instructors, but for today, she’s a patient trapped in a vehicle.
She says, “Being there without any control or knowledge of what's going on is scary. You can feel the vehicle move with different maneuvers, you can hear the glass breaking in so many different areas."
Conway says she teaches the EMT students to focus on not only a patient’s physical injuries, but their emotional state as well, saying, “Communicate with the person, let them know what's going on to help lessen that fear. Laying there, not knowing what's going on, it's like, ‘is something going to slip and am I going to get hurt more than what I am?’”
Vehicle extrication is a process first responders often see in Cascade County and the surrounding areas.
Campbell says, “We have a lot of bad crashes in the county. So, seeing this firsthand is going to give them a much better understanding of what to look for in the future when they hit the street once they graduate this class."
Students will graduate from the course at the end of the month, and will be prepared to take the national certification exam to join the Quick Response Unit.
