Well the last two days have been pretty full on. There has been a rural doctors conference here over this weekend and as part of that, on Thursday there was an emergency resource management day that the docs could attend. This involve participating in simulated exercises of emergency patient situations using a SimMan mannequin that surprisingly accurately imitates many patient conditions. So I am 2 other nurses got to participate (for free) in this session cuz it was held at our hospital. It was soo cool. It might sound boring the way I explain it but when you have something in front of you that looks pretty much like a human, talks to you, physiologically simulates medical conditions and a scenario that is realistic, it is not hard to suspend reality and believe that this is a real situation. I nwas in the fiorst group to do this and we were waiting in the hallway to come in when one of the organisers came out and said ok its time to come in now. Everyone stood up to go in but then she said she only wanted me to come in at the start. I nervously walked into the room to find a patient having a heart attack. I tried to make up what I thought would be the best things to do but the patient kept whinging about the pain so (cuz nurses can’t give medication without a doctor’s order) I rang the Dr and she came in and started to do some extra stuff. In hindsight I actually did all that I could do before ringing the Dr. I was pretty excited to find that even though I was scared and felt like I had no idea what to do, I actually did everything right. Yay! I am becoming a good nurse. Our (fake) patient ending up arresting but we shocked him and he came back and lived. Excellent collaboration.
Then yesterday we had a mock disaster involving all the emergency services, the SES, about 30 Drs from the conference and our entire hospital staff . There was real fire and real cars out the back of the hospital and then the (fake) injured came in for us to treat. Most of the volunteers were med students who had come out for the exercise. I was in charge of the walking wounded and once we treated them, they all wanted to watch what was going on with the critically injured so I lost all my patients. It was a pretty good exercise. Lots of adrenaline. But by the end of the exercise (because I had already worked my morning shift before this started) I was completely exhausted and came home and did very little.
But all in all I have learnt pack loads in the last few days and I feel a bit less apprehensive about dealing with emergency situations.