Christian Skibak: making MODEX more realistic through lifelike mannequins

Christian Skibak is a paramedic, former industrial firefighter and disaster preparedness professional who serves as head of emergency medical services at the Bavarian Red Cross in Lindau, Germany. He is currently affiliated with Canadian Aviation Electronics (CAE), where he provides the patient simulators (or mannequins) or medical and disaster response training. Christian is also a member of a German Emergency Medical Team within the European Emergency Medical Teams initiative.

A patient lies strapped to a stretcher as doctors gather around him. His leg is severely injured, and his clothes are torn to reveal a large wound below the knee. The medical team has to act fast, while also remaining calm, careful, attentive, and highly focused. To save this life, they will need to amputate the leg. 

Thankfully, what Christian is recounting is not a real emergency. It’s part of an EU MODEX large-scale field exercise designed to prepare responders for the worst moments they may face one day.  And the patient on the stretcher isn’t real either: it’s a mannequin especially designed for such purposes.

Christian is in fact very much responsible for creating such a realistic scene for doctors to train on. In his first EU MODEX, a few years back, the set-up was a little less extravagant and much less convincing. ‘The patient came inside and there was only a letter on the chest’, he recounts. ‘This letter outlined a condition, and the doctor simply did [mechanical] steps to fix the problem’. There was no sense of urgency, and the trial wasn’t challenging enough. With his background in emergency response and current work with trauma simulators, Christian realised he could improve the whole experience. He had the means to push the limits of realism during the exercise further.

The most effective simulations, as he explains, are the ones in which things go terribly wrong. Using a mannequin which is a lot more lifelike, able to scream in agony, cry, and spurt blood which is warmed up and sprayed to smell like real blood, increases the intensity and therefore provides essential coping skills for emergency responders. When a team makes a critical mistake, the mannequin can also simulate death, and the scenario suddenly feels awfully real. 

‘Sometimes, people are crying, really crying, because they are so inside of the scenario’, he says, and part of Christian’s job is to guide them through the process and calm them down. Still, he notes, it’s possible for participants to go ‘really deep into the stress’, experiencing the very real emotional weight of failing to save a life.