Bellin Health Sports Medicine helps prepare for emergency scenarios
By Kaity Coisman
Contributing Writer
GREEN BAY – Bellin Health Sports Medicine is expanding its emergency training repertoire with the help of Sports Medicine Concepts (SMC) — an organization that works closely with the NFL, NHL and MLB.
On June 28, professionals from different disciplines, experience levels and age groups joined together at West De Pere High School to create more efficient, effective and proactive emergency action plans for life threatening situations.
The event was initiated due to the past injury to NFL’s Damar Hamlin, as local athletic trainers want to be prepared for life-threatening injuries during sporting events.
SMC is a team of athletic trainers and EMTs that were able to bring a range of high-tech equipment which included mannequins that allowed for IV and advanced airway insertion as well as mannequins with CPR compression detectors.
“We thought how great would this be to bring to our staff somebody coming from the outside-looking-in to give us critical feedback and make us more efficient in those emergency scenarios because we have the skills, but we can always be better, especially when it is a matter of seconds on the line especially, in the Damar situation it was seconds and they were doing CPR on him,” stated Bellin Outreach Athletic Trainer Allison Kanaman.
This event took the place of the Bellin team’s yearly emergency action plan and procedure training that was put on hold due to COVID-19.
It was not only open to Bellin staff, but also to area physicians, physician assistants and “Green Bay Fire, and a couple of their clinical educators of their staff, so they could really talk through an EMS perspective because for many of us — me included,” said Kanaman, “— we haven’t had to call 911 for a breathing or cardiac emergency. It’s been fractures, dislocations where the patient is stable… to really collaborate with them was a huge part of this training too. Just to see that side of the training as well, and we got really good feedback from SMC. They were really impressed with our group; they gave us a few tips and tricks to improve, but I think we all just realized how important communication is and how important the preparation is prior to those events.”
She also disclosed that with her possibly working at as many as four schools she feels comforted by her ability to translate her training in emergency action plans with SMC to the field with the assistance of any coaching staff, EMT or parent with first responder training.
The SMC team ran the 50 participants through scenarios that they could then watch, receive critiques from SMC staff and equipment and see where they could have been more effective.
Kanaman said that the biggest take away from the event was how necessary effective communication is between all of the people involved.
Communication was the main topic of conversation that day as well as how to effectively communicate across disciplines and compare emergency action plans to emergency scenarios.
“I would say our stuff is pretty top-notch, but I think we are definitely going to look back at our emergency action protocols and procedures and think, ‘what can we do to make this a little bit better?’ because every second counts,” said Kanaman.
Bellin is hoping to have SMC back to Green Bay next year for another training session; next time, in-house.
“We really wanted the community to know that we are out there, and we are well prepared and working for our communities and the athletes we serve out in the communities and the families too. It’s not just the athlete it is their whole family when they are out at the high school, you know? We just wanted to make sure that the communities know that we are working with the best. We are working with the people that train the Packers’ emergency staff and the Seattle Seahawks’ emergency staff; this is very important to us and just giving them a sense of comfort, you know, this is at the forefront. We have the skills, and we are just building on them and making them better and more refined and more efficient…” Kanaman added.