There’s a heartbeat-like cadence to the questions and responses shared between adjunct instructor Jeffrey Howe, EMT-C, and his Emergency Medical Technician students. Alert and quick-witted, the group of juniors and seniors maintain a steady pulse of dialogue throughout their two-hour labs where they learn indispensable skills that will assist them in providing effective and efficient care to future patients.

“Part of this job is using your imagination,” Howe tells students during an evening class in early November. Having divided the 26 undergrads into three groups, he’s spent the past 15 minutes teaching one cohort how to apply traditional tourniquets, iTClamps, SWAT-T tourniquets, and chest seals. Letting students experiment with the equipment, he begins quizzing them.

“If we don’t happen to have a chest seal, what else can we use?”

“Plastic wrap,” one student says.

“Gloves,” another pipes in.

“Good,” says Howe, approvingly. “And if I don’t have a tourniquet, what else can I use?”

“A belt.”

Providing students with a sneak peek of one of their upcoming topics, Howe explains how the class will discuss splinting and using anything they can find to make one — including LEGOs.

“With emergency medicine, you have to make decisions immediately,” says Howe. “You're not in a nice, comfortable environment. You're either out in the rain, snow, in somebody's house, and you have to figure out how you're going to stabilize the patient, get them to the hospital, and make sure they're in a better condition than when you found them.”

Covering the basics

A new offering this academic year, Bryant’s EMT course is a two-part series that prepares students to take the National Registry examination for EMTs. Throughout the fall and spring semesters, undergrads learn about the emergency medical services system and workforce, medical legal issues, documentation, patient assessment, pharmacology, lifting and moving, airway management and respiratory emergencies, trauma, and management of bleeding and shock. They also study management of acute disorders, including genitourinary, cardiovascular, neurological, gastrointestinal, and urological systems.

“If you’re going into the healthcare field, taking a course like this is important because it gives you the ability to see if it’s something you really want to do,” says Howe, program director of Ozga EMS — the company providing the training at Bryant. “We’re never going to be without work, and it will help students when they apply for advanced schooling,” including physician assistant programs or medical school.

Back in the early November lab, Howe is running the course with the help of Bryant Fire Marshal and Fire Safety Coordinator Scott Caron and Ozga EMS instructor Jim Morris, EMT-B. Caron walks students through trauma assessment while Morris teaches how to pack wounds.

“When I wound pack, I want to utilize a clotting factor,” Morris tells students, as a simulation of a laceration to the upper thigh sits before him in a plastic container.

Creating a grape-sized ball out of a thin cloth that has clotting factors woven into its fabric, he demonstrates how students will take the ball, put it in the wound and hold it for two to three seconds before packing the wound in a Z pattern. After packing the length of the wound, he advises them to continue until the wound is filled. From there, individuals will hold direct pressure on the spot for two to three minutes to ensure that the clot is forming. Following the demonstration, undergrads take turns filling the laceration while fake blood is pumped through the cut.

Dialing up the intensity 

When students return for the spring semester, the undergrads will complete 10 hours of ride time with an ambulance crew where they will perform skills under professional oversight; this hands-on experience will help them gain a better understanding of what they learned in class. 
Additionally, the in-class rigor will be taken up a notch.

“We will compound the scenarios and, depending on how they treat their patient, we'll determine how their patient goes,” Howe says. “For instance, if they don't give the oxygen early enough, their patient's going to start to decompensate. If they don't notice that there was a break somewhere and they don't check the vital signs, we'll say, ‘Okay, now their blood pressure's crashing down, and they’re going into cardiac arrest.’ We make them think of all the things that can happen if they don't pick up on the clues they need.”

In other simulations, students will be exposed to the natural elements.

“They'll be outside. It'll be dark, so they have to use lights. It may be a little colder outside, or it may be a little hotter. These are all things they're going to have to deal with in real life,” Howe says.

Toward the end of the semester, representatives from private ambulance companies based in Rhode Island will visit the class and talk with undergrads.

“They'll recruit right during class so, as soon as students get done with their EMT course and get their national license, they will hire them immediately,” Howe says.