Video 1: Introduction to Emergency Medicine with Dr. Blair Nelson

Dr. Blair Nelson (00:00):

Hello and welcome, High School Alliance of Future Physician Students! My name is Dr. Blair Nelson. It is an honor to be here with you today for this March curriculum, where we are going to be working as emergency department physicians taking care of critically ill and injured patients in the emergency department. Should be fun, should be exciting. I’m excited. I hope you are as well!

I’ll tell you a little bit about me. I have been an emergency department physician for over 25 years. I’m also a master physician advisor with MedSchoolCoach. I love teaching. I’ve been teaching students in the emergency department my entire career. I love advising students in the pre-medical world with MedSchoolCoach. I also teach them classes at the medical school and PA school. I just really enjoy teaching. So it’s just an honor to be here with you today in this March curriculum of HSAFP!

Dr. Nelson (00:54):

We also are going to tell you about an exciting partnership that we have with a company called Full Code [Medical Simulation], which has produced a beautiful software. I’m very jealous. When I was your age, all we had was Pong. If you’re not familiar with it, you probably do a little search about it. It’s a little flip on the screen that you would hit back and forth. 

Wow. It’s amazing. So Full Code has produced software where it allows you to virtually care for patients in the emergency department as if you are the emergency department physician. And we’re going to be going through some of those cases together, caring for critically ill and injured patients through this virtual software called Full Code. So we’re excited about that and it is our March curriculum of emergency medicine. So that should be fun. 

We’re going to [have you] stop this video every now and then so that you all [your HSAFP chapter] can have some time for discussion to talk through what it would be like, what you would be thinking, or possibly doing, in this scenario.

Dr. Nelson (01:52):

As you are the ER physician in this virtual emergency department, we’re going to be learning some new terms. You probably never heard about [some] medicines. Kind of a foreign language, if you will, learning some different terms as far as anatomy and interventions, medications and so forth. 

We’re going to be learning how to approach a patient that’s critically ill or injured. What questions we might want to ask. If we can maybe even ask questions, they might be too ill, maybe what physical exam techniques we would want to use to try to figure out what’s going on, what some labs and imaging we might want to order to figure out what’s happening to this patient. That could be from blood tests to urine tests, to x-rays or CT scans. 

Then, we’re going to try to come up with a final diagnosis. What we’re thinking is actually happening to this patient, and then possibly some interventions that we might need to do, some immediate lifesaving interventions that if we didn’t do very quickly, we would lose the patient.

So why don’t we stop here first, and I want you to think about what it would be like for you as an emergency department physician. What questions come up and what thoughts come up? Maybe what feelings might become, might make you a little bit anxious or nervous if you’re the person in charge of this emergency department. So let’s talk about that now and pause this video for a moment!

🚨 Imagine you are an emergency room physician. What do you feel right now? (the quietest scream is an acceptable answer).

What is your plan of action? What resources do you plan to use?

• First, discuss these questions with 2-5 HSAFP members for a few minutes.
  
  
• Then, one Chapter Officer should ask/find volunteers to share your groups’ answers with your whole chapter!