EVERETT — Medical workers used everything from pig tracheas to dummies Saturday to help themselves prepare to face a patient or victim with breathing trouble.
About 60 paramedics and a few certified registered nurse anesthetists from the region gathered at Providence Everett Medical Center for a 10-hour airway management workshop.
The workshop’s director, Jim Rich, is in the nurse anesthesia department at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas
The ABCs of emergency care are: airway, breathing and circulation, Rich said.
"We’ve taken the A — the airway portion — and expanded it into a 10-hour course," he said. "If your patient can’t breathe, nothing else matters."
Rich flies around the country giving one-day seminars to medical professionals. No matter what medical job they perform or where they perform it — be it a paramedic or an anesthesiologist — Rich said they have one thing in common: keeping their patients breathing.
He said his course allows medical professionals to be trained for both basic and advanced emergency airway situations that could occur in about any medical setting.
In April 2002, four firefighter and emergency medical technicians from Snohomish County Fire District 1 attended one of Rich’s "Street Level Airway Management" or SLAM seminars in Texas. They thought the emergency airway training was so good, they decided to bring the workshop to Washington. Medical professionals or their departments paid $200 to get in on Saturday.
Kurt Hilt was one of those who attended the Texas seminar. "I came back and felt more confident," he said.
Rich said his course is one of the only multidisciplinary courses for medical professionals on airway management, or keeping the path clear between a patient’s mouth and lungs.
"When a person stops breathing, it’s only four minutes before brain damage sets in," Rich said.
The training educates medical professionals on a variety of practical ways to assess a patient with breathing trouble, and prepares them to deal with everything from asthma to severe head or neck injuries..
"We teach the simplest methods for maximum effect," Rich said. "It’s where the rubber meets the road."
The all-in-one class demonstrated when to go ahead with putting a tube in a patient’s airway vs. when to treat a patient with oxygen.
The session’s teachers work to prepare emergency responders for every kind of breathing problem they might encounter.
In one room, attendees practiced putting emergency breathing tubes down the throats of a dozen dummies.
Medical workers also learned about rescue ventilation, a surgical procedure used as a last resort to try to get victims to breathe.
In one room, paramedics in plastic blue smocks used scalpels and plastic tubing to practice cutting emergency airways into pig tracheas.
Kevan McCrummen, a firefighter and paramedic with the Mountlake Terrace Fire Department and Fire District 1, stood in front of one of the fist-sized chunks of meat.
Pig tracheas are "a little bigger than human tracheas, but the anatomy is much the same," McCrummen said.
He said the workshop is a chance to revisit information and techniques.
"That’s something we don’t get to do all that often," he said. "It’s good to keep up on it."
Reporter Jennifer Warnick: 425-339-3429 or jwarnick@heraldnet.com.
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