Standardized patient “Mike” with students Krithi Sridhar and Emma Sennott at the Healthy Home Lab.
Community paramedicine is a growing concept that enables specially trained paramedics to be adaptable to a wide range of situations and provide an array of services from routine care and evaluations to critical interventions—all within a patient’s home or a community setting. In doing so, they expand access to primary and preventative care to underserved populations.
Thanks to the Healthy Home Lab (HHL), students in the Emergency Medicine (EM) program now have a real-life home environment in which to hone their community paramedicine skills.
According to EM Instructor Christopher Matek, students in the Mobile Integrated Healthcare course come to the HHL to learn and practice motivational interviewing—an extremely important skill for community paramedics.
Standardized patients are situated in the home, where different environments are staged to replicate substance use disorder, behavioral health problems and chronic conditions such as congestive heart failure and diabetes. Pairs of students conduct interviews with a patient while the rest of the class observes through monitors situated in the second-floor conference room and later provides feedback on the interview.
“The HHL affords us the opportunity to have our students assess the entire patient experience—what’s going on around them and what safety concerns are at play,” says Matek. “It’s a great learning experience and helps our students learn how to make informed decisions about care plans for patients in these difficult situations.”
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This article originally appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of Facets magazine. Continue reading these articles about the Healthy Home Lab:
- Pitt’s Healthy Home Lab: Home Sweet Healthy Home
- The Pitt Healthy Home Lab was Once a Family Home
- For this Health Informatics Assistant Professor, Aging in Place is Personal
- Pamela Toto named director of the Healthy Home Lab
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