Streetwise is an 8 hour course that is provided by Suncoast Technical College (STC) in the final week of Emergency Medical Technician Course. This course was designed to take the EMT student that just completed all of the book knowledge and skills and allow them to put it altogether on near-real scenario’s(both medical and trauma) using live patients that are made up with moulage.
STC is turned into a little City that contains a hospital, law enforcement, and Fire-Rescue and a dispatch center. These patients are scripted and placed all over the campus and the EMT Students utilize real Rescues from Sarasota County Fire Department (between 5 to 6 reserve Rescues are used). The nursing program at STC provides student nurses and the EMT Lab is filled with hospital beds and this becomes the Emergency Room. EMT Students are dispatched (utilizing real communications) to various medical and trauma scenarios on the campus along with law enforcement if needed for their call. Once on scene, the EMT Students take turns being the Charge EMT and begin assessing their patient(s) and provide the appropriate treatments and actual transport to the made-up hospital. During transport the EMT must communicate over the radio to the charge nurse and continue their assessment and treatment of their patient.
Once at the Emergency Room, the EMT’s then transfer their patient over to a hospital bed and give an updated report to the nurse. After this, then they must restock their vehicle, do the patient care report and then place themselves back into service available for another call. This started at 1430 hours and was over by 2200 hours. Each Rescue contains 3 to 4 EMT’s and there are two Instructors/Evaluators assigned to them for grading and evaluation review after completing each scenario.
On Friday, May 13, 2016, Southern Manatee Fire Rescue District participated in this Streetwise Class, 12 of our personnel (Officers and Firefighters) and their families volunteered to be patients. Chief Gorski was the make-up / moulage expert that moulaged our personnel with various types of injuries and illnesses, from sucking chest wounds, impaled objects, open fractures, burns to pale/sweaty skin for a myocardial infraction or cyanosis for dyspnea to even a child birth.
At the very end of this class we did a mass casualty incident, which had about 20 patients. This final scenario involved a husband that showed up at school to see his pregnant wife that was having an affair with a teacher. The husband showed up with guns and knife’s and began shooting and chopping everyone that he came in contact with including his wife and during all of this excitement, the wife goes into labor and delivers a baby. In this scenario, the first in Rescue had to give a radio report of what they found, request law enforcement, begin START Triage and assign Rescues as they arrived to patients. All patients were then treated and transported to the hospital while protecting and preserving evidence on the scene.
Lieutenant Adam Chevalier, Lieutenant Adam Perry, Firefighter/EMT Robert Davis, Firefighter/EMT Peter Saxman, Firefighter/EMT Paul Wojcik, and Firefighter/EMT Matt Yoder and their family members participated as patients. By utilizing our personnel as patients made this class very successful because of the experience that our personnel had over these types of scenario’s that we did in making the scenario as real as possible for these students. Thank you to all of our personnel and their family members in making this class a HUGE success.
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