A training program administered by the Medical College of Georgia (MCG) at Augusta University is “bringing advanced trauma skills directly to emergency room staff who need them most.”
For the last year, a team of MCG physicians “has successfully piloted a state-funded portable simulation training course, called Rural Interactive Trauma Simulation (or RITS).” Now the program’s program success has led to its renewal.
“We’re teaching them how to stabilize a patient in a rural or community setting to get them to that next step,” stated the program’s creator, Erika Simmerman Mabes, DO, trauma surgeon, and director of surgical simulation and program director of the Surgical Simulation and Education Research Fellowship in the MCG Department of Surgery. That next step, of course, is transporting the patient to a distant trauma center.
MCG states that the program “addresses a critical gap in rural healthcare: maintaining competency in life-saving procedures that medical staff rarely perform but must execute flawlessly when needed. With 35 rural hospitals, 33 critical access hospitals and 53 Georgia counties without any hospital at all, the challenge is immense.”
