Critical Care Transport Training: New Strides in Simulating the Austere Environment

The air medical transport arena requires the practitioner to develop clinical and diagnostic reasoning abilities to manage the dynamic needs of the patient in unstructured, uncertain, and often unforgiving environments. High-fidelity simulation can be instrumental in training interprofessional flight teams to improve competency through quality and safe patient care during medical transport that may otherwise take years to learn because of the inconsistency in real-world experiences. Because of the suboptimal circumstantial conditions inherent to critical care transport, a helicopter simulator designed to discretely replicate the phases of flight and train teams in air medical transport scenarios has been developed at the Dorothy Ebersbach Academic Center for Flight Nursing at the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing in Cleveland, OH. The goal is to prepare interdisciplinary critical care transport flight teams in collaborative practice, research, and leadership through measurable and highly structured learning activities.