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Rural Health Care Providers Receive Hands-on Training
Rural Health Care Providers Receive Hands-on Training
Michelle Pinon - News Advertiser
Local health professionals received hands on training during a recent two day course at St. Joseph’s General Hospital in Vegreville.
Mary Hanson, a Clinical Educator at St. Joseph’s General Hospital and the Killam Health Care Centre, said it was a collaborative effort between St. Joseph’s General Hospital and the Rural Health Professions Action Plan (RhPAP).
The course is designed for rural health professionals including: physicians, nurses, emergency medical responders as well as primary care and advanced care paramedics. Approximately, 20 local health professionals took part in the course.
Hanson said, “The CARE (Comprehensive Approach to Rural Emergencies) course is fully practical, with full emphasis on practicing skills and working through high-fidelity (realistic, based on real experiences) situations. This provided all participants multiple opportunities to demonstrate effective techniques to manage challenges we often encounter as a rural site:
Early recognition of a critically (or soon will be) ill patient
Effective airway management, judicious use of interventions and processes
Emphasis on necessity of ongoing assessments, monitoring, investigations
Effective team communication and collaborating within the interdisciplinary team
Appropriate clinical judgement and decision-making
The course is intended to review and share updated processes related to emergency care skills that are within the educational and professional role for those attending but are not required or used on a frequent basis.
For example, St. Joseph’s doesn’t have a labor and delivery program however we provide infrequent emergency obstetrical care. We are the initial triage site for trauma care and provide critical care prior to patient transfer however this may include interventions that our staff would only provide if they were working in the ER department at that precise time.
Registered Nurse Sydney Giebelhaus was one of the participants and commented about the course. She began working at St. Joseph’s back in 2017 when she was a nursing attendant. Giebelhaus said she signed up for the course because, “The course is geared towards rural emergency health care providers which is unlike many other courses are offered and is also taught by rural healthcare providers. And a great opportunity to work with our paramedics and physicians in a supportive learning environment.
We worked through numerous cardiac, respiratory, and obstetric emergencies in small groups of nurses, paramedics, and physicians. It was very informative and gave us a lot of resources and communication techniques. This course showed how important each of our roles are in the care of our patients. It provided us with realistic scenarios using the resources that we have available to us in our rural facility.
She added that, the course had given her and other participants “a vast skill set that we can use in many different clinical settings and communication skills that will be valuable throughout my nursing career.”
