Designing for Prehospital Care Training : Aiding the development of mental models within procedural memory, through a training toolkit that improves proficiency in prehospital care procedures such as REBOA.

Abstract: This is an educational design project exploring how prehospital care training can be altered to improve mental proficiency for emergency medical professionals.  The London Air Ambulance performs a complex life-saving procedure known as REBOA (Resuscitative Endovascular Balloon Occlusion of the Aorta) on the roadside; the only emergency medical service to do so worldwide. Teams consisting of a doctor-paramedic pairing are required to perform at their peak in extreme environments, making training for such circumstances crucial. As a result, this project strategically maps current mental processes into a framework, identifying multiple design opportunities to approach chaotic accident scenes. The framework acts as the basis for defining a curriculum, which, using Instructional Design principles, develops into a learning programme that highlights how learners experience training activities to modify communication habits and on-scene behaviour. A three-part toolkit embodies this learning programme, functioning as a sensory guide to explicitly direct attention at pre-, mid- and post-procedure interaction events between team members.