Background
We report the development, implementation and results of a sustainable region-wide mass-casualty management pre-hospital training program implemented by the Regione Lombardia emergency medical services (EMS) agency AREU in Italy.
Methods
The educational program learning objectives are: 1) Command and control, communications and resource management. 2) Mass casualty triage and the START triage protocol. 3) On-scene management 4) Regione Lombardia and AREU Mass Casualty standard operating procedures 5) Inter-agency communications and relations. For each course edition data on participants summative assessment, participants feedback and costs were collected.
Results
Between June 26th,2013 and December 31st,2020 a total of 84 editions of the provider training event were delivered, training an overall 1329 prehospital providers. 1239 (93%) passed the summative assessment and were qualified as being operationally “ready”. Regarding participants’ feedback, the overall program was rated 4.4±0.7out of 5. The overall cost of running the provider program during the study period was € 321,510 (circa US$ 382,000). The average cost per edition was € 3,828 and € 242 per participant.
Conclusions
We have described a simple yet interactive simulation and blended-learning approach, which has yielded good pass rates, good participant satisfaction and contained costs to systematically train emergency medical service personnel.