(1) What is your essential question and answers? What is your best answer and why?
EQ: How can an EMT team best execute first aid during an endurance challenge?
Answer 1: An EMT team can best execute first aid during an endurance challenge by creating a priority list of objectives.
Answer 2: An EMT team can best execute first aid during an endurance challenge by being prepared to treat injuries specific to the endurance challenge.
Answer 3: An EMT team can best execute first aid during an endurance challenge by identifying symptoms that the runners are trying to hide or are unaware of prior to the event.
My best answer is my first one, An EMT team can best execute first aid during an endurance challenge by creating a priority list of objectives, due to the ability to use this skill in any situation. Answer two only explains how to treat injuries and answer three explains how to identify, but answer one allows medical personnel to create a plan of action before entering the scene of the emergency. I used two textbook sources to help me back up this answer. The first is in a book titled First Responder, 8th Edition, by Chris and David Bergeron. There is a section called "Caring for the Medical Emergency" that gives a descriptive layout of a general priority list that can be applied to most situations. The second source is in EMR Complete by Daniel Limmer, which has a chapter titled "Incident Management" that describes what to do in situations that have more than one patient.
(2) What process did you take to arrive at this answer?
I had originally created this answer in my junior year of high school when we had our first day of senior presentations. I have wanted to do first aid as my senior topic since freshman year, but I had no idea we needed to create an EQ and a best answer, so after the first senior presentation I saw, I decided to get ahead of the game and create my answer. This does not mean I had any real justification for this to be my best answer though. When we began to research our topics on our own, my mentor had given me several textbooks to use. Most of them had layouts of general lists of objectives to accomplish in just about any medical emergency. I then asked my mentor to teach me his own way of handling a medical emergency. I had the opportunity to practice this newly acquired skill on October 19th, 2013, when I worked at the medical booth at an Ultramarathon. At one point during the day, we had several patients come to the booth at once and my mentor asked me to decide who should be treated first and how to treat them, so I went down my list of priorities. First was to check to see if any of the patients were in critical condition, in this case none of them were. Next I deduced that none of the patients' injuries/ailments needed to be treated right away (from a medical standpoint), so I decided that the participants in the marathon should be treated first, otherwise some of them would either leave or become a detriment in the care of the other patients by being an annoyance. This is the real world application of my best answer.
(3) What problems did you face? How did you resolve them?
My first problem occured when the teachers required me to change my EQ from how a bystander should handle a situation to how an EMT team should execute first aid during an endurance challenge. This wasn't a major problem because all I needed to do was tweek my way of thinking about the project. Two real problems with my senior project occured later on; I did not have enough opportunities to volunteer and I didn't have enough research. I began helping my mentor teach some of his first aid classes and assisted him in menial work (grading papers and preparing supplies), which solved my first problem. In order to solve the research issue, I had to broaden my scope of sources to online articles, not just textbooks.
(4) What are the two most significant sources you used to answer your essential question and why?
My two most significant sources would be my mentor, Robert Ethridge, whom is an EMT and medical unit leader for the US Forest Service, and one of the textbooks he has given me, titled EMR Complete by Daniel Limmer. My mentor has been a great help to me throughout this project by consistently giving me opportunities to apply the skills I have learned from him and has given me many good sources for research purposes. EMR Complete outlines how an EMT should execute first aid and tips on the best ways to handle medical emergencies.
