Greater Sydney Area HEMS

Prehospital Trauma Education

Posted on January 16, 2015 by Cliff Reid

This talk was presented at the London Trauma Conference in December 2014, by Dr Cliff Reid, Director of Training for Greater Sydney Area HEMS.

Dr Reid explains how the HEMS induction program is crafted, and how it has evolved to include simulation, stress exposure training, perturbation training, and cross training. He reveals how the team has striven to increase the physical, psychological, and functional fidelity of the simulations. He also explains the approach to testing, in which the performance of teams in the focus of assessment, rather than the knowledge of individuals. The ‘educational laboratory’ of HEMS induction is continually a work in progress.

For further information check out the list of references.

Posted in simulation, training | Tagged education, human factors | Leave a comment

The Retrieval Medicine Environment

Posted on January 14, 2015 by Cliff Reid

This 15 minute talk by HEMS Physician Karel Habig provides an introduction to our working environment for newcomers to prehospital & retrieval medicine

Posted in Presentations | Tagged HEMS, pre-hospital, retrieval | Leave a comment

Winch Operations

Posted on January 12, 2015 by Cliff Reid

This presentation was given at the Retrieval 2014 conference in Glasgow.

Posted in Presentations, training | Tagged extrication, HEMS, rescue, winch | Leave a comment

Location location location

Posted on January 11, 2015 by Cliff Reid

Do you know how to give the latitude and longitude of your location when calling emergency services?

Any smartphone can manage it, but you have to know how. Several free apps are available, but you don’t necessarily need them – the phone’s in-built apps can often do the job.

Here’s how to find the “lat and long” on an iPhone (as shown on resus.me, applicable at the time of writing in 2014):

So the above coordinates would be read as:

‘My location is latitude thirty-three degrees, fifty-five minutes, seven seconds South, longitude one hundred fifty degrees, fifty-nine minutes, twenty-three seconds East‘.

Remember exact location is part of the METHANE message to be called in when declaring a major incident.

How precise is this?
A second of latitude is approximately 30 metres. A second of longitude varies in size. At the equator, it is approximately 30 metres, the same size as a second of latitude. The size gradually decreases to zero as the meridians converge at the poles.