ImperialPHEM – Training the doctors of tomorrow

W Bro Mark Russell SLGR reports 
The London Freemasons’ Charity recently received a request from ImperialPHEM for financial assistance to help them train medical students. The Charity was pleased to issue a grant of £5,000.

Unable to meet face-to-face because of COVID restrictions, W Bro Mark Russell SLGR met online with Benjamin Watkins, the organisation’s President, to find out more about their work and how the grant would be utilised.

Benjamin firstly explained that the name stands for Imperial Pre-Hospital Emergency Medicine, a society at the Imperial College School of Medicine. The society aims to involve medical students in the field of pre-hospital care and to provide free and open access to medical education.

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ImperialPHEM was founded a decade ago to increase student engagement with the speciality of pre-hospital emergency care. It does this by arranging observer shifts with the London Ambulance Service, educating at the Imperial Trauma Conference and providing small group training sessions.
These training sessions are delivered or facilitated by clinicians. Some are in the traditional format of classroom teaching but, more recently, the concept of “simulation education” has been increasingly adopted.

In these sessions, the students are asked to imagine they are working within a pre-hospital medical team, such as paramedics, and are given an actor or manikin to assess and provide treatment to in a realistic setting.

When asked how the grant would be utilised, Benjamin explained that it would be used to purchase equipment to facilitate this simulation training.
Items on their wish list include:

• A full-body manikin and intravenous access trainer to enable them to run cardiac arrest and blocked airway scenarios with a great degree of realism.
• A paediatric manikin to help run simulations involving children.
• A ‘scoop’ stretcher and other trauma equipment that can be used when they simulate emergencies such as people falling from a height or involved in road traffic accidents.

When asked what effect the grant would have, Benjamin said: ‘ImperialPHEM is incredibly grateful to the London Freemasons’ Charity for the generosity they have shown. This grant will enable us to purchase vital equipment to support the teaching of medical students and allow us to run high-fidelity simulation training with a high degree of realism. Such equipment was previously prohibitively expensive, and our ability to deliver training to the standard we aspire to was therefore severely restricted. As such, this equipment will transform our educational output benefitting the students of today and their patients of tomorrow.’

Bro Mark found it very humbling to know that the London Freemasons’ Charity is making a positive contribution to the training of the next generation of medical care providers.

This article is part of the Arena Magazine, Issue 45 July 2021 edition.
Arena Magazine is the official magazine of the London Freemasons – Metropolitan Grand Lodge and Metropolitan Grand Chapter of London.

Read more articles in the Arena Issue 45.