Prehospital care training in a rapidly developing economy: a multi-institutional study

Area of Science:

• Emergency Medicine
• Public Health
• Medical Education

Background:

• Trauma is a leading global cause of death, particularly in developing economies.
• Rapid motor vehicle expansion outpaces prehospital training, leading to preventable deaths from road traffic injuries.
• A critical need exists for effective prehospital training to reduce trauma-related morbidity and mortality.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and evaluate a scalable medical first responder training program.
• To assess the program's impact on clinical confidence among laypersons in prehospital settings.
• To establish a model for improving trauma care in rapidly developing economies.

Main Methods:

• Developed two tiers of training: Acute Trauma Training (ATT) and Broad Trauma Training (BTT).
• Delivered intensive, hands-on workshops to diverse laypersons (police, firefighters, drivers) across three Indian institutions.
• Utilized pre- and post-training self-assessments with statistical analysis (two-sample t-test) to measure changes in clinical confidence.

Main Results:

• Statistically significant improvements in clinical confidence were observed across all training topics for both ATT and BTT protocols (P < 0.0001).
• Training demonstrated reliability and reproducibility across different geographic locations (Jodhpur and Jaipur).
• Over 900 individuals were trained, indicating program scalability.

Conclusions:

• The developed training program shows significant promise for enhancing prehospital trauma care in developing settings.
• Program expansion offers a scalable solution to increase the rate of trained medical first responders.
• Future work will focus on clinical competency assessments and advanced trauma training tiers.