Medicine

Today we are providing rural health training for Medicine students in their second year.

We have been very lucky that several emergency services have agreed to take part in this. We have got today the Mountain Rescue Service, the Welsh Ambulance Service, the Fire and Rescue Service, and the pre-hospital doctor service.

This is part of the Medical Curriculum and this is the first day that the students have performed a simulation. 

The students will go round the different scenarios, each one will get about an hour with the services as well as the simulated patients that we have got today.

It's real life experience education where they get the experience on how to assess people but not within a clinical setting, what sort of resources will they have and how will they do this in a safe way.

My name is Sahla Siji. I'm a second year medical student. Today we've been doing a simulation day, so we were asked to be in different situations. For example a car accident, and we were sort of being trained and seeing how we act in an acute medicine setting. I think one of the main things that I've learned is learning to use minimal resources to get the best sort of patient outcome, and always prioritising the patient in any setting you're in and having this day was very useful for that because, we're not always going to get all the resources like we would in a hospital. So having not limited resources, but enough was very useful to have that adaptability skill.

It's quite a unique thing that we do in Bangor, which rarely happens anywhere else in the UK where they actually get hands on experience on a 1 to 1 basis with emergency services. That's quite an attractive thing for the students because they enjoy the day, but they also have these learning outcomes that they have to achieve, which goes from knowing what the injury looks like, understanding how the human body works, and and gaining knowledge of how to assess and manage them, but also then knowing how the team work happens and other emergency services work.

I spent the morning, started it with mountain rescue. We were learning how to prepare people for transfer, how to warm people from hypothermia, and I've just finished an intubation session. So we got to practice securing airways and intubated mannequins, which was really cool and interesting. 

Having these hands on experiences are very useful early on, especially because I'm only a second year medical student now. So anything we learn from a young age I think is beneficial later on, only because the more you experience, the better.

It's a very wholesome experience for them. It goes through the whole day. And yeah, we've had very positive feedback in the past and so I'm quite enthused. And the medical services enjoy themselves as well.