MEDscience program finds benefits to videoconferencing approach
When the patient went into cardiac arrest, more than a dozen high school students started CPR. Urged on by a watching ER doc, the students didn’t let up until the patient, 78-year-old Bettie Smith, revived and sat up, to everyone’s relief. After all, it had been their recommendation she use an inhaler to ease the shortness of breath that had brought on the attack. Together, the students, the ER doc (in reality an instructor for a 10-year-old medical education program called MEDscience), and Bettie (MEDscience’s executive director, Julie Joyal) encouraged and guided the students toward an appropriate diagnosis: heart attack due to a blocked coronary artery. By the end of the hourlong simulation, Bettie was off to get a catherization that would ease the blockage that was robbing her heart muscle of blood and oxygen, and the students had a much better idea of a heart attack’s lesser-known symptoms and how a heart...