Oh, it looks like Daniel
Graphic warning: Daniel is a mannequin who has had a very bad day indeed
This week I found my kids watching a YouTube video showing how robots made various items, from donuts, suitcases, to wire fences.
It was surprisingly fascinating.
I thought of that video, or more specifically the use of technology, when I went to an appointment at Dunedin Hospital today (Wednesday) at 10am.
And when I say ‘appointment’, I actually mean the Otago Clinical Skills Laboratories, which was running a trauma-themed simulation demonstration.
Sign me up.
And that is where I met Daniel.
He is later wheeled into the simulation suite - made to look like that of an emergency department - where a team of doctors and nurses are waiting for his arrival.
They are told that the 31-year-old suffered a ‘blast injury’ and when the paramedic wheels him in I can see that Daniel’s left leg did not join him.
We can hear Daniel groan while the medical staff listen to the paramedic who runs through a list of his injuries, which also include blast injuries to his abdomen and chest.
Medical staff cut through his shirt, which reveals a blood-stained chest, which rises and falls with each pained breath.
A tourniquet had been applied to the leg at the scene, and another patient with similar injuries was “en route”.
The medical team immediately gets to work on Daniel, who within several minutes is now screaming in pain.
“Are you alright there?” the doctor asks him.
A pained Daniel later tells them that “I can’t breathe”, prompting staff to correctly identify that his left lung has collapsed.
He is given an intubation, while other procedures included a chest drain, stemming blood flowing from the bleeding leg, and providing blood products.
“They did a great job, and the patient survived,” Dar said.
And it was just as important for those staff to discuss what they did, or didn’t do, in a debrief immediately after the training simulation.
Before ‘Daniel’, as he is only known as today, is wheeled into the room Dr Ohad Dar, an ED doctor who is also the Simulation Centre / Clinical Skills Lab co-director, describes why he is important.
The $150,000 dummy cannot only moan and talk, it can breathe, cry, blink - with the eyes even able to react to light - and bleed. Lots and lots of bleeding.
This is later demonstrated when his tourniquet is removed and spurts of blood, or in this case red dye, comes from the dismembered wound and covers his latex skin.
I’m standing next to Dar in a control room behind a two-way mirror, where several of his colleagues are on computers and listening to the audio of what is unfolding before us.
Staff talk calmly as they describe what is happening, while listing the priorities for the patient.
But the relief when the simulation is over is obvious.
“Thank God,” says one.
Dar said when he became a consultant at Dunedin Hospital in 2014 there wasn’t a lot of simulation, but “healthcare simulation has definitely increased across New Zealand over the last generation”.
It was not uncommon for larger New Zealand hospitals to have this type of simulation training, the Dunedin example was a joint venture involving the hospital and the University of Otago’s Medical School.
The training facility had other mannequins, but not with the same capabilities as a high-end mannequin like Daniel, who even came with ‘bespoke packages’, Dar said before listing the gruesome add-ons.
But those were important to prepare staff to have “the skillset to deal with emergencies in the future”.
“Training never stops,” Dar, who is originally from Israel, said.
“Staff here are committed to training and providing good healthcare.”
Dar said there was a lot of scrutiny on medical staff over the service it provided the New Zealand public, and “I want the public to know how much healthcare staff value that, and we want to provide good care”.
“We want to be proud of our own skills, proud of the team we work with, and proud of the service and care we provide our patients in our community.”
And that is likely to improve even further with the training centre set for a major upgrade as part of the new Dunedin Hospital rebuild.
The Interprofessional Learning Centre, which was a partnership between Te Whatu Ora Southern, the University of Otago and Otago Polytechnic, would see the size of their facilities increase.
That was a fascinating Wednesday morning, and good luck in the future Daniel!
There was another simulated incident in Dunedin, this time at the airport on Sunday. Check this picture out.
It was designed to test coordination between multiple emergency services, and involved some 80 volunteers acting as passengers and family members, and 50 people working across emergency services
Dunedin Airport chief executive Daniel Debono, said it was critical that emergency training exercises were as true to life as possible, simulating worst case scenarios to ensure emergency response procedures are thoroughly tested.
And, I spotted this on the back page of the Otago Daily Times this morning.
This is very curious. To me, ‘inference’ and ‘clarification’ are not the same thing.
I approached the Otago Regional Council for a comment and got this:
“Dr Borren declined to comment.”
Gardner quit about a year ago, a role she held for four years.
At the time of that announcement, former chairperson Andrew Noone thanked Gardener for her “considerable contribution”.
“She has raised the practice and performance of the organisation in many areas and has been a well-respected and highly thought of CE. Her legacy will be evident in several areas, particularly with the strength of the team she has built in the organisation.’’
In March the ODT reported that:
“the council’s latest annual report said Mrs Gardner received her regular remuneration package and an extra $313,785 on her departure, which included “accrued annual leave of $73,978 and $25,000 as severance.”
While the annual report listed the payments as “termination payments”, the council said Ms Gardner was not terminated and instead resigned.
Mrs Gardner, who has moved to Wellington, could not be reached for comment.’’
I can see why the ODT didn’t publish a clarification (assuming that they were asked) as they didn’t need to. They wrote the story and went to the parties for comment.
But the ORC decided to pay for an ad instead. This reads to me like legal action has been directed towards the regional council, which decided a paid ad in the same paper that carried the story would suffice.
As an aside, I filed the below LGOIMA request after Gardner left: seeking all minutes of a public excluded meeting where a vote of no confidence in Sarah Gardner was put forward.
I got this as a reply:
“The Council is satisfied that the need to protect privacy is not outweighed, in the circumstances of this particular case, by any countervailing public interest in disclosure.”
I have taken the council to the Ombudsman, but that has a lengthy waiting time, by the time we get an answer we will be on our second chief executive at the ORC…
Earlier today I caught up with Barry Watkins, whose claim to fame was having survived a horrific shark attack at St Clair on March 30, 1971.
You can read more about that here, and it was great to hear that the Dunedin City Council is replacing the plaque which he donated over a decade ago.
Anyway, I received an email from a shark researcher eager to know more about Watkins’ close encounter, and I matched the pair up.
I hope to share some details with you at a later date, but Watkins was visibly stunned by some of the initial information.
Some of you may know that I am something of an auction nerd, and we are spoiled here for some great auction houses.
But I spied an out-of-town auction of some interest to all of us.
Check this out, the Fairfax archives vintage photographs of Aotearoa, features 100 years of Dunedin between 1860-1960. Incredible.
Below is a snowstorm from 1939, and don’t these lads look happy about it.
Here is Tweet of the Week. I’ve always loved this piece.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Elvis recently (I blame the movie), and it reminded me of this local homage: Big Fat Elvis.
And lastly, please let me know in the comments where you think this was taken:
Have a great week.
Tunnel Beach
My Mum who was 91 when she died had wonderful memories of the 1939 snow storm tempered by the fact that soon a lot of her family would start vanishing to war