Emergency sirens and blue beacons on the school timetable

How do you keep calm during an acute accident, so you can provide advanced first aid and coordinate the treatment of accident victims? 

That is what a class of medical students at AU will find out for themselves in December when the graduate course ‘Pre-hospital activities’ is offered for the first time. 

The course is an elective subject that will provide the students with practical experience of working with acute pre-hospital preparedness. It will also provide an understanding of holistic patient processes from the moment the emergency call is made until the patient is delivered to the hospital department or otherwise aided.

On the final day of the three-day practical training section that is incorporated in the course, the students will be dispatched to the scene of various accidents, where they will meet victims of traffic accidents, armed assaults and fires. The accidents are constructed and the victims are played by schoolchildren using make-up.

"The idea is to make it as lifelike as is possible in a training setting so there will therefore be qualified personal from different emergency services involved in the scenarios that we have planned," says Course Coordinator Ingunn Riddervold.

The students will end up working together with police, fire fighters and ambulance crews. 

The basic theoretical aspect of the course is conducted by pre-hospital research staff in collaboration with external lecturers.

Translated by Peter Lambourne