Emergency Management - Fall 2008 - (Page 52)

Players must determine how to triage injured characters, and this decision-making trains them for ﬁeld work in the real world. nology partners, including Vega Group, a UK-based technology training and consulting company that’s been involved with virtual academies and aviation training simulations. Medical partners included the Manchester Royal Infirmary; the Advanced Life Support Group, a medical education charity; and ambulance authorities in northeast England. performances in tests and [the] kind of retention with this kind of training,” Webb said. He and his colleagues have been pleased with the data they’ve received from MIMMS training tests. “It is actually showing an improvement in retention of information from the group that did the training for the software, and also an improvement with accuracy and speed.” “I thought it was probably something that would be fun for somebody to use, and it asks the user to make some decisions. And then based on those decisions, the patients were cared for appropriately or not, and I think there’s value in that.” — William Chapleau, paramedic and manager, American College of Surgeons Webb said the game would be appropriate for various medical professionals, including first responders, hospital personnel, law enforcement officials and firefighters. The bulk of the game’s development took about nine months, starting in early 2007, Webb recalled. After this period, TruSim began testing its prototype with people, including those training under the Major Incident Medical Management and Support (MIMMS) protocol for first responders. He said that TruSim is compiling testing data to assess the video game prototype’s performance to see if it’s ready to take to market, possibly internationally. “We’ve not only worked with the medical experts and the training experts, but we have gone further, having produced this prototype to begin double-blind tests to see whether people actually do genuinely improve their 52 When TruSim decides to go to market, it could make the triage simulation available on multiple platforms, but Webb believes the PC would likely be the primary platform. “The way we’ve developed it, we’re kind of console-agnostic. Actually Blitz is an entertainment company [that] completely owns and develops its own engine, and the philosophy within the company is to keep things as cross-platform as possible,” he said. “With the technology that we have in-house — the Blitz engine — it’s actually possible to write a game that then delivers onto PC, Xbox 360 [or] PlayStation 3.” Triage Trainer after viewing Web footage of an earlier version of the current prototype. “I thought it was probably something that would be fun for somebody to use, and it asks the user to make some decisions,” said William Chapleau, a paramedic and manager of the Advanced Trauma Life Support course offered by the American College of Surgeons. “And then based on those decisions the patients were cared for appropriately or not, and I think there’s a value in that.” But he thinks value only applies if players are already being mentored in a traditional teaching environment, as likely would be the case with any triage training game. “If you gave that game software to a policeman or a fireman who has had absolutely no medical training, they would make mistakes and then make the right choices maybe the second or third time around. But they might not know why it was the right choice,” Chapleau said. Chapleau felt the video game was realistic in its portrayal of casualties and emergencies, but Joseph Grafft, a former president of the National Association of EMS Educators, said the visuals could use an overhaul. “The graphics I didn’t really care for. It looked more like a game my kid would have,” he said. “I think the graphics need to be cleaned up a little bit. Some of these cartoons and things that you see now Disney puts out, these people look real, and the graphics look graphic.” Grafft has taught first responders for more than 30 years and is a faculty member at the Metropolitan State University School of Law and Criminal Justice in Minnesota. He also said, from what he saw, the game didn’t place enough emphasis on surveying the area for safety. “There should have been a dropdown [menu] of some sort that said, ‘scene safety: check scene, didn’t check scene,’ to be OK,” he said. Students need to know how to evaluate a disaster scene for their own safety as well as those they’re helping. “I think for a novice student, that’s very, very important because there [are] too many first responders who are injured and killed because they didn’t do a good job of looking around.” k The Jury Speaks But without a full release, people will have to settle for gameplay videos. A few first responder trainers in the U.S. shared their opinions of

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Emergency Management - Fall 2008

Emergency Management - Fall 2008 Contents Contributors Editor’s Letter In the Field Deep Freeze EM Bulletin Major Player In the News Uncharted Waters Bio-Sensing Bluegills Joint Accounts Education Directory Degress of Change Triage in 3-D Products Eric's Corner Last Word

Emergency Management - Fall 2008

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