The BerbeeWalsh Department of Emergency Medicine has partnered with the UW Health Clinical Simulation Program to bring a new mobile simulation training ambulance (Badger-3) to area EMS personnel, with a goal of providing high-yield field training in a setting that can’t be replicated in any other way.
The sim ambulance joins two on-scene physician response vehicles (Badger-1 & Badger-2), which aid in providing medical direction and prehospital outreach across Dane County — a partnership that has gone back more than a decade.
In 2022, UW Health brought online an ambulance that has all the capabilities of an active ambulance in the field, but is used to educate medical first responders, called EMS, on rare or difficult-to-train-for cases when they are at their stations.
Medical training professionals from the UW Health Clinical Simulation Program, located at University Hospital, travel with the ambulance to EMS agencies of the UW Advanced Life Support Consortium, a group of EMS providers in Dane County that contract with UW Health for medical direction and training, according to Dr. Sushant Srinivasan, medical director, UW Health Clinical Simulation Program, and associate professor of pediatrics, UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
“The ambulance gives us a chance to be there in the field helping train our EMS partners in Dane County so they can learn about those rare cases that they might not see often enough to know how to treat,” he said.