A free PDF tool which will help your students collect the info needed for a PCR WHILE helping them learn the assessment skill
How can we best help our EMS Students? We should build an environment in which they are constantly learning…or studying even without knowing it.
This is one goal of Sterling Credentials–to maximize the value gained by students every time they use it.
Inline with our goal to make sure no new educator EVER has to create a new form, we present our EMS Student PCR Field Note–a hard copy form to send with your students to clinical shifts.
For us “synaptic pathway architects”, everything must add educational value to the student experience; thus, our PCR Field Note uses several techniques to assist students out on their clinical adventures
First (and most importantly)–it parallels the assessment psychomotor skill. This feature provides a number of benefits:
- Students tend to think of classroom, lab, skills, and clinicals as distinctly separate elements. Using the progress of assessment begins to reveal how everything is linked and interwoven.
- The PCR Field Note tool provides many medical terms to assist the student in expanding their vocabulary.
- The tool gives special attention to the assess-then-immediately-intervene cycles specifically important to answer questions on the NREMT cognitive exam which requires rigorous adherence to these cycles.
Second, it provides a guide (and security blanket) to your unsure fledgling students. It helps them make sure to gather all the info they need for their electronic PCRs–just like in real life.
Third, we’ve provided prompts for a timeline narrative format (light gray on back in narrative area) where students can draft their narratives. We chose this format because the literature shows that the human brain wraps around “stories” the best thus resulting in enhanced understanding and retention of important facts.
I hope you find this tool useful–there is no reason to reinvent the wheel. Download it and offer it to your EMS students. It can be printed side-by-side on a regular 8.5×11 paper which, when folded, fits handily into cargo pants pockets!
Use it as practice during simulations and see what happens. And if you like what we did with this, you should see what we’ve done with the Sterling Credentials platform…always supporting student development.
Invitation to Contribute
If YOU have developed your own form or guide or tool, and you’d like to share it with other educators, please reach out to us [email protected] and we can host it for you and attribute authorship. What did you have to build which you wish you’d just had on hand? Yeah, that stuff is what we’re looking for.