Have you ever heard of Nunavut?
Timothy Willett, MD, may look like a San Franciscan indie-rocker, but he’s really a Canadian tech geek doctor with a big heart.
Last year he did a really cool pilot study in the Nunavut Province of Canada (a piece of land so large – 2.1 million square kilometers, or 1.34 million square miles for us non-Canucks – that it would be the 15th largest country in the world if it were a sovereign nation!) which despite its size, has a population of only 30,000. Because of the terrain, climate and sparse population density, getting medical resources or personnel to critically ill patients is extremely difficult. In fact, a medical–response helicopter ride from Ottawa to the capital of Nunavut, Iqaluit, takes four hours. Which means getting someone who is either severely injured, or in acute renal failure, for example, could take eight hours. So Dr. Willett conducted a simulation training for community physicians in Iqaluit using web education modules, video-conferencing problem-based cases, and training on simulation task-trainers like Sim Man to train them in dealing with critically-ill patients, in order to improve their chances of survival in less-than-ideal health care conditions.
His pilot project resulted in increased confidence on the part of the doctors in dealing with such situations, increased knowledge in critical care treatment, and improved performance across two Simucases. These encouraging outcomes lead to another pilot involving critical care nurses in Iqaluit, and further pilots planned for interdisciplinary team-based trainings.
Hearing about this project really had me thinking about the use of emerging technology in medical training, and how it can be so much more than just med students tinkering around in a high-tech campus sim center. Dr. Willett described the high cost and complicated logistics of getting the equipment up to Nunavut, an area well-served by access to such resources, due to its remoteness. I appreciated his innovative use of task-trainers, video conferencing and web modules to stretch the boundaries of their more popular current uses. And I’m also excited by the ideas generated in regards to team-based training, and how this could help areas where physicians are scarce (due to geography, over-population, etc.) or where remote clinics are staffed by a mixture of med techs, medical students on away rotations (like areas in Africa and South America) and nurses.
You can read a little more about Dr. Willett’s project here.
