Effective team coordination and decision-making skills are essential for emergency medical personnel. First responders are particularly vulnerable because of the urgency of their decisions, subsequent actions and frequent unknowns. Currently, training for medical personnel focuses on procedural knowledge and skills. Effective training in team coordination and decision-making for EMT personnel responding to CBR/WMD is not available.

The aviation industry has been providing similar team coordination and decision-making training to aircrews for well over thirty years. Our approach includes capitalizing on that experience and applying some of the same principles and techniques to development of a tutor that trains emergency medical responders for CBR/WMD threats.

One of our goals is to foster a better learning environment for CBR/WMD incidents by enabling learners to participate actively in the team coordination and decision making processes, to think reflectively about what they are doing and the decisions they have made, and even to work collaboratively with other EMT learners through the problems presented by the tutor. In addition to the life-and-death decisions regarding their patients, EMTs may be faced with other more far-reaching decisions that involve the contamination of themselves and others with highly toxic substances. The design of the tutor is based on established CRM principles. When used in an active learning environment it should assist EMTs in learning what goes into making sound decisions under stress and how to coordinate the activities of their team rather than functioning independently.