Publications by authors named "Kit Lavell"

Objective: As the incidence of active shooters increase, local emergency response has also changed. South Metro Fire Rescue coordinated a series of hyper-realistic active shooter simulation drills involving multiple agencies.

Methods: "The Next Nine Minutes" was one of the largest active shooter drills performed to date with 904 personnel that were trained in 18 mass casualty active shooter drills.

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Background: Surgical trauma care requires excellent multidisciplinary team skills and communication to ensure the highest patient survival rate. This study investigated the effects of Hyper-realistic immersive surgical team training to improve individual and team performance. A Hyper-realistic surgical training environment is defined as having a high degree of fidelity in the replication of battlefield conditions in a training environment, so participants willingly suspend disbelief that they become totally immersed and eventually stress inoculated in a way that can be measured physiologically.

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Introduction: Far-Forward Damage Control Laparotomies (DCLs) might provide direct-compression of visceral hemorrhage, however, suturing is a limiting factor, especially for non-physicians. We thus compared abbreviated skin closures comparing skin-suture (SS) versus wound-clamp (WC), on-board a research aircraft in weightlessness (0g) and normal gravity (1g).

Methods: Surgeons conducted DCLs on a surgical-simulator; onboard the hangered-aircraft (1g), or during parabolic flight (0g), randomized to either WC or SS.

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Background: Torso bleeding remains the most preventable cause of post-traumatic death worldwide. Remote damage control resuscitation (RDCR) endeavours to rescue the most catastrophically injured, but has not focused on prehospital surgical torso hemorrhage control (HC). We examined the logistics and metrics of intraperitoneal packing in weightlessness in Parabolic flight (0g) compared to terrestrial gravity (1g) as an extreme example of surgical RDCR.

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Background: Hemorrhage is the leading cause of preventable posttraumatic death. Many such deaths may be potentially salvageable with remote damage-control surgical interventions. As recent innovations in information technology enable remote specialist support to point-of-care providers, advanced interventions, such as remote damage-control surgery, may be possible in remote settings.

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