Here's how you can assess the effectiveness of emergency preparedness training programs.

As a senior medic in the military, I was responsible for ensuring all medics maintained their EMT and BLS certifications. Very rarely did we have any medics not meet the requirements to recertify. However, this was just a fraction of the training needed. In order to ensure medics were able to properly perform their duties, we also had them complete trauma lanes to ensure their battlefield skills were kept honed. While these lanes were pass/fail, they were designed to identify training shortfalls and implement further training to ensure the medics skills were adequate.

Training is one of my passions when it comes to battlefield medicine. I always ensured participants were engaged as the skills I taught have meant the difference between life and death for some of my students. If I see students not fully engaged I will ask directed questions or decide to do hands on training and insert the individual who was not engaged into the training to ensure they would learn from the exercise. Many times, if we had the resources available, training would culminate into a field exercise where all the skills learned in class would be put to the test in a fast paced setting, forcing students to reflect on their training from the past week in order to succeed. This worked better than post-training surveys.

Again, as stated before, while quizzes help gauge a regurgitation of knowledge, scenario based hands on application always seemed to work better. Doing life-like scenarios not only gave a reference point for students to fall back on in the event something did happen in real life, but it gave an extra chance to teach skills that may not have been picked up on in the class, something that tests cannot do. Also, in training you learn one piece at a time. In scenarios, you should have to apply knowledge from multiple days of training at the same time to ensure success. This again helps establish connections to the training with real world application.

One of the biggest things I looked for in my military students were the setup of their gear before and after training. Many times before training, people would have their Individual First Aid Kit (IFAK) somewhere that was extremely difficult to reach for them and/or a rescuer. I made sure to implement some of these terrible locations when doing scenarios by placing an IFAK on my simulated casualty on their back or somewhere difficult to reach. After having to deal with that, most students ended up moving their IFAK from the terrible location it was at to a more accessible location. This showed that they realized the importance of the training and the equipment.