Posted by Matthew Mac Partlin on Monday, September 10, 2012One of the many nice things about working as a medic at motorsports events, apart from the cars, the racing and the atmosphere, is the chance to work alongside a focused group who share the same goals and work co-operatively to a purpose. Everyone brings something to the playing field and a lot of traditional barriers come down. This probably explains in part why managing a trauma victim in a hazardous, resource-limited, potentially high-stakes environment often feels like it flows better than some of the cases I've been involved with in fully-staffed, resource-rich hospital settings. However, we don't always pull it off perfectly.
Then I came across an interview on one of the pre-hospital blog sites that I follow and it laid out bare another component of motorsports rescue that we would all recognise, but may not have put together. The interview is a podcast led by Queensland RFDS retrievalist Dr. Minh Le Cong on his
PHARM site, discussing the topic of clinical logistics with UK-based ED and Retrieval physician Dr. James French and
EM Crit's Dr. Scott Weingart.
The message of the discussion revolves around how to best create the circumstances wherein knowledgeable and skilled up clinicians can operate efficienly in a context specific situation. They discuss the use of checklists and procedural aide memoirs (PAMs), intervention-specific equipment packing and training drills, amongst other things. Most, if not all, of the issues they hash out can be applied to providing rescue and medical care at motor sport events, with some adaptations here and there.
The interview is well worth a listen and I suspect that when you do, you'll either be nodding in recognition and agreement or saying "We need to adopt this into our practice" ... perhaps both.
The podcast is
here.
