It can take up to two-and-a-half hours to drive from Berlin in Green Lake County to the nearest pediatric hospital.
That’s according to Evan VandenLangenberg, chief of Berlin Emergency Medical Services. His community is one of the initial participants of Orion Initiative training, a new program offered by the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health that aims to expand advanced medical training to rural communities.
VandenLangenberg told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that one of the biggest challenges for smaller communities to receive this kind of in-person training is budget limitations.
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“The struggles that we have really come down to finding good training, finding people who are willing to come out to the middle of nowhere to meet with us and be at our trainings, and funding,” he said. “It all comes down to having money to provide good training and materials, which can be tough with our little budget and yet such a broad area of people.”
Rural paramedics most often deal with calls that involve adults, VandenLangenberg said. But when calls do involve children, he said they can be the most critical situations. And their limited hands-on training with children combined with the seriousness of a pediatric emergency often creates undue stress for EMS providers and can lead to worse care outcomes.
Dr. Amy Kind is CEO of the Orion Initiative and the associate dean for social health sciences and programs at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. Kind told “Wisconsin Today” the idea for the initiative came after witnessing a “great need” for such care in rural communities. A private donation helped get the project off the ground.
Roughly one-quarter of Wisconsin’s population lives outside of any metropolitan area. People in these rural areas are less likely to have insurance and often have worse health outcomes than residents in urban areas, according to the Rural Health Information Hub.
“When we think about individuals who serve rural areas, they’re typically hard to recruit — very dedicated, but specialty care is extremely limited,” Kind said.
In the vision for the Orion Initiative, rural health care providers learn directly from advanced medical trainers at UW in sessions tailored to their needs. They then can pass that training along to other local service providers.
After its initial pilot program, Kind said she hopes UW trainers will take what they’ve learned from Green Lake County and other regions to further expand training sessions, ultimately covering all of rural Wisconsin.
In the training sessions, EMS workers and paramedics train on high fidelity simulators, or highly advanced mannequins designed to simulate a human body in distress.
Dr. Manish Shah is a professor of emergency medicine at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. He said a high fidelity simulator is the closest thing you can get to working on an actual person, and that makes such in-person training priceless for medical professionals.
“You can feel a pulse. You can hear breath sounds. You can listen to the lungs. It can vomit on you. It can start bleeding from its injuries. You can put an IV in,” he said. “It really replicates reality.”
Shah is the UW lead for the Wisconsin STARS (Simulation Training to Advanced Rural Services) for Children Program, which oversees the children’s EMS training under the Orion Initiative.
“We want to do anything we can to make these EMTs and paramedics more comfortable and less stressed when they have to care for that baby having a seizure or that toddler having an allergic reaction or that kid in a major trauma,” he said.
