I am not a video game player, but I am interested in innovative training ideas. I lost interest in video games in after way too many late nights in college playing Madden Football with my roommates.

Zero Hour: America’s Medic is “is a single player point of view serious game designed to allow you the opportunity to build on and apply your skills as a medical first responder within a virtual environment.” This intrigued me enough to contact the developers of Zero Hour – the National EMS Preparedness Initiative at George Washington University to learn more. Gregg Lord, Co-Investigator and Director of EMS Policy for NEMSPI was kind enough to give me and my EMSEduCast co-hosts access to review Zero Hour and its potential for EMS training and education.

Since Zero Hour is part of a research project to evaluate the efficacy of gaming as a training tool the experience starts with a pre-test about mass casualty and WMD topics. If you are like me you are probably thinking – enough already with the bioterror and WMD training, but Zero Hour was funded by a $3 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security.

Next you choose a player and receive some training on how to navigate through the levels, the available equipment, and how to get information from and communicate with dispatch. As an inexperienced gamer I was impressed with the level of detail and the thought that went into designing the game.

After a few minutes of training (orientation to the game) I responded to my first call: a middle aged male with a persistent blood tinged cough that had just returned from a trip to Africa (hmmm … ). My virtual partner and I drove to the patient’s apartment. The computer makes it easy to lug our gear up three flights of stairs (whoops I forgot the O2 tank). There were four family members in the apartment (surprise they were all sick). Proper PPE seemed to be the most important consideration.

Learn more about Zero Hour

Listen to EMSEduCast interview with Gregg Lord of NEMSPI

Related posts:

1. Serious Gaming for EMS Providers Part 2
2. EMSEduCast – Are you listening?
3. Video: EMSEduCast – the podcast by and for EMS educators

Tags: EMSEduCast, Gaming, Mass Casual, NEMSPI, Podcast, training, WMD, Zero Hour

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 10:00 am and is filed under Tools, Reviews, & Other Neat Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.