BILLINGS — One of the most important parts of your health is knowing what to do in emergency situations, which is why MSU Billings hosted athletic trainers Tuesday afternoon to instruct them on these very skills.
"I've been doing this for 47 years now, and it's still new every year," said Don Gleason, a now volunteer athletic trainer.
Gleason has seen just about everything in half a century as an athletic trainer, but even he was in class Tuesday.
"We can't practice enough, because there are so many different scenarios that you have to be able to deal with," he said.
The main focus of the athletic training program's emergency session is to take care of injured athletes in rural places, which often times comes with bad weather.
"Being out in the elements, right, where we aren't traditionally practicing at. We really have to think and practice those critical skills," said Kylie Izzi McKinney, the clinical coordinator of the program.
Every year McKinney instructs medical professionals in the athletic training program on what to do in emergency situations during high school and college sports. These athletic trainers can be school nurses, firefighters, EMTs, or anything in between. Gleason worked as one for over 30 years, where he now volunteers as needed.
Whereas most emergency training programs focus on care with abundant resources, the athletic training program centers on emergency situations around real-life scenarios where resources are more scarce.
"A lot of the time, athletic trainers are on the sidelines in rural cities. So, even when in our outskirt areas around Billings, there's sometimes where there are limited resources," said McKinney.
On Tuesday, McKinney helped these athletic trainers practice five situations in which an athlete might injure themselves during a game. One of these scenarios was a basic sprain, whereas another was an athlete entering cardiac arrest.
"Those can range from breathing emergencies, respiratory illnesses, cardiac events, to C-spine injuries that you see sometimes at the football games, and then to lower extremities orthopedic injuries," said McKinney.
"Strains and sprains, those are kind of things are the most common things. The true emergency things are the rare things, but they're the ones that are the most important. So, those are the ones we train for," said Gleason.
And this training will be life-saving as the new school year arrives.
