Imperial, Wauneta EMS receive medical training in unlikely place

Emergency Medical Services (EMS) volunteers from Imperial and Wauneta met in Wauneta Monday night to receive training in a truck.
Not an ordinary truck, but a 44 foot long customized truck that provides mobile, real-life experiences designed to enhance life-saving skills.
The truck and training is known as SIM-NE, standing for the University of Nebraska Medical Center Simulation in Motion-Nebraska.
The project was launched in 2017.
The free training is provided to local EMS and critical access hospitals. It is high tech simulation training that allows hands-on team-based education. People are trained side-by-side with people they routinely work with.
SIM-NE helps show communities that EMS and critical access hospitals are taking measures to make local emergency medical response the best possible.
Leanne Klein, president of the Wauneta EMS, said that organization applied to schedule a visit by SIM-NE.
“Last year they were unable to do it due to Covid. They just started up again.”
She said one-half of the truck is designed like an emergency room, while the back half is designed as an ambulance.
The customized truck features dual slide-out room extensions. Besides the emergency and ambulance rooms, it also has a control room and high-tech, computerized patient simulators that talk, breathe, have heartbeats and can react to medications and other actions of the learners.
Klein said the training Monday night focused on adult trauma such as that found in a motor vehicle accident, and pediatric overdoses and the use of Narcan, which is a narcotic reversal medication.
The SIM-NE trucks are stationed in Scottsbluff, Norfolk, Kearney and Omaha. Klein said they can be scheduled to  visit a community twice a year.