Background
Teaching emergency procedural skills in a wilderness setting can be logistically challenging owing to the austerity of the learning environment and lack of appropriate simulation models.
Objective
To effectively teach these skills as part of a wilderness medicine elective for medical students, we designed an outdoor simulation session with low-fidelity models to examine whether this is an effective teaching tool.
Methods
This is a retrospective study involving 13 fourth-year medical students who completed an outdoor simulation laboratory session as part of a month-long elective in wilderness medicine. The session involved 6 stations in which procedural skills were taught using homemade low-fidelity simulators. At each station, they encountered a “victim,” who was acting as the patient in a simulation scenario. Each victim required an emergency procedure that was performed using the low-fidelity model. Before the start of the course, the students answered a short survey with a Likert scale questioning their comfort levels with the emergency procedures. In addition, each student answered 10 objective questions about how to do the procedure. At the end of the course, the students took the same survey to rate their comfort levels with the same skills and answered the same 10 objective questions.
Results
The data from each student were paired and analyzed with the Student t test. In regard to comfort levels, there was statistically significant (P < .05) improvement after the session for every procedure. In regard to objective knowledge, the students demonstrated improvement with the procedures after the session based on average scores, but only had statistically significant (P < .05) improvement with needle decompression and femur traction splints.
Conclusions
Using low-fidelity simulation models in an outdoor setting is an effective teaching tool for emergency wilderness medicine procedures, and improved students’ comfort levels as well as their objective knowledge.