AURORA | Traveling at speed and hemmed in by an arsenal of equipment, the back of an ambulance is hardly the ideal place to provide life-saving medical care.
However, it’s the environment paramedics find themselves in every day, as they rush injured and dying patients through traffic to hospitals and make the most of their limited space and gear.
Aurora firefighters, too, may find themselves in the back of an ambulance as they hand patients off to Falck Rocky Mountain crews — a circumstance that Aurora Fire Rescue hopes to better prepare its members for with the help of a new, fully-equipped training ambulance.
“Most of the time we get there without an ambulance yet, and so we’re trying to train all of the way through showing up on scene with our kits, starting the call, having the ambulance show up and then getting in the back of the ambulance and working in the back,” Aurora Fire Rescue medic and field instructor Amber Dawson said.
“It’s very, very hard to mimic a real call and the adrenaline of that happening,” she said. “This helps us do that. It helps pull all of the pieces together.”
With the help of an ambulance donated by Falck and close to $90,000 in other donated and purchased equipment, Aurora Fire Rescue is trying to replicate the real-world conditions of prehospital care in a mobile training lab that the agency plans to rotate among its 17 fire stations to keep firefighters’ skills sharp.
The vast majority of calls handled by Aurora Fire Rescue involve a person or people requiring medical care, the agency’s medical director, Eric Hill said. All Aurora firefighters are expected to have or earn their certification as an emergency medical technician, and until recently, all were expected to go through the more demanding paramedic certification process.
The training lab’s interior has been set up to mimic the inside of a working Falck ambulance. Other equipment used in conjunction with the lab includes an anatomically-accurate dummy that medics fitted with an oxygen mask, intraosseous medication drip and heart monitor during a simulated response to a heart attack May 31.
Instructors controlled the heart monitor to simulate different stages of cardiac emergency and provided other feedback through monitoring equipment in the lab that medics were expected to respond to once the dummy was loaded into the ambulance.
“The idea is to bring the most realistic training environment we can so they can practice this,” Hill said. “And Aurora is pretty spread out. Because this thing is mobile, we can literally go to different stations and move around.”
Investing in the oversight and training of paramedics has been one of the priorities of Chief Alec Oughton since he joined Aurora Fire Rescue last year.
Oughton compared the certification process for paramedics to “drinking from a fire hose” and said continuing education is particularly important for providers working in a field as intricate as prehospital care.
“A typical part-time paramedic program is maybe two years,” Oughton said. “There’s a ton of complexities. You’re asking people to walk into any number of different scenarios where they might have 10% of the information.”
During his tenure, the chief has also re-established the agency’s medical branch to improve oversight of paramedics and rolled out numerous policy changes to comply with and build on the requirements of the consent decree reform agreement that also involves the Aurora Police Department.
Related to the consent decree, the rollout of the lab comes as the agency grapples with the convictions of Jeremy Cooper and Peter Cichuniec for their roles in the 2019 death of Elijah McClain.
Since the convictions, about 11.7% firefighters certified to work as paramedics have told Aurora Fire Rescue they are no longer willing to provide the more advanced level of care associated with the certification, commander Brandon Sauder wrote in an email.
Instruction through the mobile lab will be provided by medics such as Dawson as well as dedicated medical staffers employed by the agency to firefighters at a variety of education levels.
“I think this is just an example of how special, and creative, and caring our folks are,” Oughton said. “I think it’s really going to bear fruit.”
This sounds like an excellent plan for a very difficult and stressful job.