La Trobe University and Ambulance Victoria are using advanced simulations to give paramedic students a unique hands-on experience.

Transcript

Narrator:

This may look like a traffic accident but it is actually a simulation. La Trobe University and Ambulance Victoria have teamed up to give paramedic students a taste of what they might face in an emergency situation.

Tina Ivanov:

Its really important to teach our new recruits ambulance skills such as in a simulated environment, because it gives them an opportunity to try out what they have learnt and put it into real life practice but without putting anyone at risk. So it gives them a great experience and a great learning opportunity.

Narrator:

The training coincides with La Trobe’s ground breaking paramedic course which begins in 2010. The four years Masters of Paramedic Practice is part of the new course offering for the 88.9 million dollar La Trobe Rural Health School in Bendigo opening in 2011.

Susan Furness:

La Trobe University really values collaboration with both Ambulance Victoria, other industries and services throughout rural and regional communities such as Flinders University, these students that you see today are Flinders University students and the benefit of having them here has been that we have taken part in some of the training  for their course in terms of their bridging program, but we have an opportunity to work with them here again and also to showcase the event this year, which the opening of our brand new program.

Tina Ivanov:

What we find is people from regional areas, when they train in regional centres, they tend to return to regional areas which is exactly what we need, we need to boost the numbers we provide within regional centres and get through some of these people who have trained in places like Bendigo with some new ideas and some fresh outlooks on what they bring to those communities.

Narrator:

Developed by Ambulance Victoria, the simulated emergency provides students the chance to learn some of the skills needed by paramedics outside the classroom in a real world type environment.

Murray Spencer:

The simulation was great, I thought there was a good variety of injuries in the car, and it really made us think and put a bit of effort into it.

Susan Furness:

This is an opportunity for them to get out to pull together some of the skills they have learnt over the past few months, to work together, to work collaboratively with each other and to actually support each other by doing the scenario such as this, and the research is out there to show that scenario work in paramedic training goes hand in hand basically.

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