Dynamic Multi-Skill Assessments

The Dynamic Multi-Skill Assessment is an exercise that reviews and or tests your ability to perform many of the major components of a real-life patient scenario. Your ability to manage a dynamic patient scenario requires the mastery of many individual skills. Individual skills that you have learned in other sections of this book can be lumped into several mini-scenario sections.

For this exercise, grab an instructor to run you through a mini scenario and multi-skill assessment. For each of the following you will be placed as a team-member on the scene of a call. You will be directed to initiate the following treatments as the scenario evolves:

Vital Signs

One of the most common skills requested of an EMT is to accurately take and record vital signs. It’s also one of the most critical things to do correctly and in a timely and efficient manner. For this section you will be given a medical or trauma patient and asked to take a set of vital signs including a heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, and skin condition and report them to the team lead.

Patient Communications

This section reviews your ability to communicate the major components of patient communication while providing care, including introducing yourself and explaining procedures to a patient suffering from a medical or trauma emergency. You are evaluated on your ability to communicate comfortably and confidently who you are, your professional assessment, and your treatment plan.

Shock Management

In this section your instructor will give you a patient who requires bleeding control or splinting. The patient will progress into hypovolemic shock requiring your further treatment.

Airway Interventions

For this section your instructor will give you a shortness of breath patient who may require ventilation, airway management, and/or suction.

Alive to Dead

In this section your patient will progress from being responsive with a pulse and decompensate into cardiac arrest. It is your job to identify and assess their clinical decompensation and intervene with the appropriate therapy. This may mean doing compressions, initiating ventilations, positioning the patient and/or administering a medication.