The Alabama Fire College is investigating the Decatur Fire & Rescue recruit school after a recruit training program was paused.
“A video has been shared with Decatur Fire/Rescue that was taken from one of our previous training classes ... The video was taken during a drill that was intended to show recruits that they may have respond to very odd circumstances on emergency calls,” Decatur Fire & Rescue Chief Tracy Thornton said in a written statement.
The video of the training scenario, according to the The Decatur Daily, “shows an apparent simulated medical emergency — a man lays face down on a bathroom floor with his pants down around his thighs. The handle of a plunger appears to protrude from the man’s backside, although it isn’t actually lodged in him.”
Chief Thornton is correct and charitable to describe this training scenario as “inappropriate.” The phrase, “I know it when I see it” comes to mind for assessing training as inappropriate, but as educators and trainers, we have a responsibility to avoid planing and conducting scenarios that can later be judged with the “I know it when I see it” test.
What to avoid in EMS training scenarios
Instead, start scenario planning with the training objectives and current knowledge, skills and experience of the participants. Next, remember these 5 things to avoid in EMS scenario planning:
- Illness or injury caused by sex acts
- Patient history findings based on stereotypes
- Patient or bystander role players using racial slurs toward rescuers or one another
- Unplausible distracting injuries, non-sensical patient history or assessment findings, bizarre scene elements or illogical bystander activity that is irrelevant to the training objectives
- Patient or bystander role players verbally or physically assaulting rescuers (unless the objectives of the training are de-escalation and self-protection)
In EMS and emergency medicine, it is common to say, “just when I thought I had seen it all,” but that’s not license or encouragement to stage training scenarios that mix the worst you’ve seen with the worst you can imagine. If instructors, in the process of planning and preparing an EMS training scenario, begin to one-up each other or “yes, and ...”, that’s a warning that a scenario might be straying from its objectives and heading toward inappropriate.
Finally, remember that the two things that most often come after “inappropriate,” are “media attention” and “investigation.”
