Strategically Leapfrogging Education in Prehospital Trauma Management: Four-Tiered Training Protocols

Trauma-related injury in fast developing countries are linked to 90% of international mortality rates, which can be greatly reduced by improvements in often non-existent or non-centralized emergency medical systems (EMS)-particularly in the pre-hospital care phase. Traditional trauma training protocols-such as Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS), International Trauma Life Support (ITLS), and Basic Life Support (BLS)-have failed to produce an effective pre-hospital ground force of medical first responders. To overcome these barriers, we propose a new four-tiered set of trauma training protocols: Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Trauma Training, Acute Trauma Training (ATT), Broad Trauma Training (BTT), and Cardiac and Trauma Training (CTT). These standards are specifically differentiated to accommodate the educational and socioeconomic diversity found in fast developing settings, where each free course is taught in native, lay language while ensuring the education standards are maintained by fully incorporating high-fidelity simulation, video-recorded debriefing, and retraining. The innovative pedagogy of this trauma education program utilizes MOOC for global scalability and a "train-the-trainer" approach for exponential growth-both components help fast developing countries reach a critical mass of first responders needed for the base of an evolving EMS.