Grant brings new EMS training manikins to Ore. first responders

Gearhart Volunteer Fire Department/Facebook

By Jasmine Lewin
The Daily Astorian

GEARHART, Ore. — The Gearhart Volunteer Fire Department will collaborate with Columbia Memorial Hospital and Clatsop Community College on emergency simulation training using new, state-of-the-art equipment funded by a competitive federal grant.

In 2022, the Oregon Area Health Education Center secured a federal Simulation Education Training grant through their Oregon Pacific Area Health Education Center at Samaritan Lebanon Community Hospital. The Lebanon center purchased the grant equipment and distributed it to local fire departments.

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Eventually, that led to Gearhart, a regional training hub, receiving two full sets of adult and infant training manikins.

Eric Wiser, the director of the Oregon Area Health Education Center, said the equipment enables organizations like the fire department in Gearhart to provide more realistic scenarios to educate and train health care professionals and emergency responders, especially those serving in rural and medically underfunded areas.

“Otherwise, health care professionals would just go without training or be forced to travel to receive it, which takes time and resources away from their community,” he said in a statement.

The new manikins, which are anatomically correct and the size and weight of typical patients, will allow emergency medical services personnel to perform and practice all invasive and noninvasive lifesaving procedures.

The manikins give paramedics the chance to practice nasal and oral intubation, the ability to create and monitor vital signs, full cardiac arrest simulation and even cricothyrotomy, in which a surgical incision in the patients’ neck can open an airway.

“The manikin will actually tell us whether or not we did a good job,” Gearhart Fire Division Chief Adrienne Park said.

Park first got involved in helping with the grant process when she was working as a paramedic at the fire department in Lyons . When she left for Gearhart earlier this year, a new set of manikins came with her.

“I moved from one rural community to another rural community … And I’m like, ‘Look, you know, I see a huge need with all my mutual aid agencies, with the ambulance service that I’m also part-time at, we could use these up here,’” she said. “So they granted me a second set.”

As a training hub, Gearhart offers emergency medical response, pre-hospital trauma life support and CPR classes to neighboring agencies within Clatsop , Columbia and Tillamook counties.

So far, the Seaside , Warrenton and Elsie fire departments have utilized the new manikins, as well as Medix Ambulance Service . The Astoria Fire Department has plans to borrow them as well.

Equipped with the new gear, Gearhart is expanding partnerships by providing use of the manikins to the community college, which offers basic, intermediate and advanced emergency medical technician courses, and to the Astoria hospital in an effort to better prepare health care professionals and students for real-life emergencies.

“We are always happy to work with local fire departments for local emergency response training and we look forward to this collaboration as more information becomes available,” said Kristen Wilkin, the dean of workforce education and training at Clatsop Community College.

The college and hospital, along with fire departments across the county, will be able to check out the manikins through a process Park said is similar to checking out a library book.

“Basically anyone in the area, if I’ve met their chief, I’m like, ‘Hey, what would you like? Would these manikins benefit you?’ And then it kind of takes the authority of having to maintain them and store them off of these departments and puts it back on me, and so I kind of basically just became a facilitator,” she said.

The upgrade is timely. Several fire districts in recent years have reported increases in calls for service, as well as a growing number of trauma cases.

“The tourism is where you get your traumas, right, people going swimming, car accidents, things like that,” Park said. “But your aging population is where you’re going to get more of the health issues, your cardiac, your medical-related issues. And I think, honestly, it’s going to continually go up.

“It’s kind of been a huge blessing, and I know that fire departments are ready to get the manikins and use them, because they’re very nice and we’re creating more advanced life support personnel. Which is great for our communities, because you’d rather have the highest-trained personnel when you’re having your emergency. So I think it’s a great opportunity for this area.”

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