South Central Ambulance Service - Simbulance

Requirements

The faculty specialises in the teaching of students in paramedics and social work sciences in the practical teaching of clinical skills simulation. The South Central Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust is a part of the National Health Service, established on 1st July 2006 following the merger of four ambulance trusts in the counties of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hampshire and Oxfordshire. This area covers approximately 3554 sq. miles with a residential population of over 4 million.

Their emergency operations centres handle around 500,000 emergency calls each year. As a part of their on-going development, our cSkills recording system was chosen as part of their new mobile "simbulance", a fully functional ambulance used to train and educate medics all over the region.

Some of the key features our system had to deliver were as follows:

• Implement an easy to use system to allow multiple users to record the various simulation scenarios that take place in the sim ambulance area
• Integration with the Laerdal manikin simulator, so that the vital signs feed can be recorded as well as the camera feeds
• Easy to use software for de-briefing students

The Solution

Three fixed wide angle cameras were installed in the practice area along with with ceiling mounted microphones capturing the audio. The neighbouring control room has a video and audio preview and houses the main recording and control equipment.

De-briefing and viewing are carried out on the main system in the control room, furthermore an additional tablet was provided to allow simultaneous recording functions, tagging and de-brief from the device.

The main features of the fixed camera solution include:

• Fixed wide-angle cameras to allow complete coverage of the practice area
• The main control laptop features a simple and intuitive user interface allowing a wide range of functionality including camera selection, tagging, mixing vital signs and starting/stopping recordings
• The system is connected to the Laerdal sim allowing the mix of cameras and vital sign information
• Recordings are available almost instantly for playback and de-brief as soon as the session is complete, via the cSkills playback software
• User definable tagging facility allows the user to mark the video at a specific point of interest. The tags will then appear alongside the video in the playback software, allowing the user to quickly access that particular point of the recording at the touch of a button