Simulating Prehospital Cardiac Arrest Resuscitation with Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO)

Thursday. January 10, 2019 - 1 min

During the 10th Annual Neonatal and Pediatric ECMO Educational Conference at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh in August, 2018, myself, other emergency medical technicians from Carnegie Mellon University EMS, paramedics from the City of Pittsburgh EMS, and Dr. Leonard Weiss simulated the use of prehospital extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) on a manikin patient to demonstrate and discuss the viability of prehospital ECMO for refractory ventricular fibrillation cardiac arrest. This simulation ultimately led to a poster presentation at the annual meeting of the National Association of EMS Physicians (Leonard S. Weiss, David Palmer, Jeremiah Escajeda, Mark Pinchalk, James Dlutowski, John Mooney, Adam Palmer, Scott Studebaker, Tom Goode, and Francis X. Guyette, “Creation, Training, and Simulation of a Field Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) Team”, National Association for Emergency Medical Physicians annual conference, Austin, Texas, 10 January 2019).

Below are images of the simulation during the conference.

ECMO Crew