There’s the old saying that practice makes perfect. Athletes might practice in a gym, but for these Avera doctors and nurses, they’ll take any vacant conference room they can find.
“We call this a pediatric emergency conference, so really just practicing if you have a pediatric emergency walk through your door, how do you handle that and what are the most common ones?” said Lesta Whalen, MD, a pediatric hospitalist at Avera McKennan.
Specialized Care For Children
Kids are unique, and their care should be too, especially in times of emergency. That’s the driving factor as to my medical professionals ranging from EMTs all the way up to critical care pediatricians from across the Avera footprint work have gathered to test hone their skills for the smallest of patients.
“Kids in general present a little bit differently when they're sick. It's hard because they present everywhere all over the state and they can be really scary to take care of,” said Jennifer Reed, MD, a pediatric hospitalist at Avera McKennan.
“We see it every day, but not everybody in our system sees pediatrics every day. They just hit a different kind of heart string for people and so you really want to give some confidence and really help people feel confident taking care of the kids that come through their door” said Dr. Whalen.
Luann Lessman is a registered nurse who works in the ER at Pipestone County Medical Center. She was chosen to be the lead on the first simulation of the afternoon.
“Let's roll them back. Let's inspect his posterior and let's roll on the count of three. One, two, three,” said Lessman.
The sights and sounds are incredibly lifelike, but this is just one of the specialized child-sized manikins that can react and vocalize in real time. The programming is controlled by the pediatric critical care team leads and can simulate a wide variety of condition and injuries.
“For the skills lab, we just really want people to get their hands on with kids and the kids sizing. So we have emergency providers, we have nurses, we have emergency technicians, flight nurses. We have a kind of a slew of people that are all here getting skills,” said Dr. Whalen
While the team in this room works on reestablishing a child’s airway, another group is working to identify a possible traumatic brain injury. Situations that may only happen a few times in a providers career, but they need to
“And so figuring out how does a three month old present that is having a hard time breathing or that maybe has a different rhythm or a different heartbeat. They might just be a little bit sleepy or not be feeding as well and not really specific symptoms. So figuring out what are those kind of tiny nuances? How do we figure out if they are safe, not safe? And then where do we start to get them stable and get them feeling better?” said Dr. Reed.
“We have a definitive airway. There we go. Ventilate,” said Lessman during the simulation, treating her manikin and situation as if it were the real thing.
“I think it was fabulous because it gives you an incident where you have a traumatic patient and you're having to work through the ABCs. Things are changing and you're intervening and seeing the results. It's kind of like the nursing process where you have a problem, you evaluate, you see the results and then you reevaluate and say this patient's taking us on a course and let's go with it and let's treat them and see what we can do,” said Lessman.
Growing Pediatric Specialty Services
The pediatric hospitalist specialty is relatively new in the last five to 10 years within the Avera Health System. The main challenge has been figuring out how to take those critical care skills and better support the regional and rural care centers. Another part of that the pediatric emergencies conference is developing a skills and process library so that there's an simple one-stop for pediatric care for conditions ranging from pneumonia to skin and soft tissue infections to make sure that care is most up-to-date and consistent no matter where you're being seen.
“I think just showing, one what we have done in pediatrics and what we are already capable of, but what is starting to come and what we're hoping to do for the region and the communities that can keep our patients in their in their setting in their homes is really, really exciting,” said Dr. Whalen.
“Hands on practice like this is priceless, very much so. And you just continue to learn and learn and learn,” said Lessman.
Learn more about pediatric specialty care at Avera
