Date Published | Sept. 20, 2007

When young doctors and nurses are trained in hospitals, they often spend a lot of time watching more experienced colleagues at work instead of doing things themselves.

Sometimes they just need a reminder of how a procedure is done before performing it themselves.

That’s the idea behind Pocket Snips, a collection of two-minute instructional videos on simple procedures like putting a cast on a broken bone, inserting an IV, applying local anesthetic to a finger, suturing a cut and removing a mole.

Health-care professionals can pull up the videos on their Blackberries.

The videos are the result of collaboration between the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM), Laurentian University’s School of Nursing and Sudbury Regional Hospital.

“The typical thing that happens when you teach somebody procedures is you say ‘Oh, we’ve got someone in here with a shoulder dislocation. Have you ever seen one of those put back before?’” said Dr. David Topps, director of eLearning at NOSM.

“The typical response will be ‘Oh yes, Dr. Smith showed me one two months ago.’ The doctor will say, ‘Ahh, Dr. Smith uses a slightly different technique. Tell you what, watch me do this one, and you do the next one.’

“By the time the next one comes around, two months have gone by. Residents are always watching, and they’re not doing. The idea behind Pocket Snips is to watch it on video and do it yourself.”

Emergency room doctors at Sudbury Regional Hospital were filmed on the job by a professional videographer from Laurentian University’s Media Centre. Nine videos have been made so far, but more are in the works.

The videos were peer reviewed to ensure the best way of performing medical procedures is shown. All the patients appearing in the videos gave permission to be filmed for educational purposes.

The emergency room doctors originally wanted to film the procedures themselves. But Topps, who led a similar project at the University of Calgary before he came to NOSM, convinced the doctors that a professional videographer was needed.

“When I arrived and heard that the emergency doctors were enthusiastic and wanted to do this, I said, ‘Great. It’s wonderful that we have enthusiastic doctors. But don’t let them do it themselves’,’ he said.

“We did the same thing at the University of Calgary to start with. What happens is you get amateur night. Having it properly planned out with storyboarding and professional videographers actually lowers your cost. While the whole process takes longer, what you get out is much more usable.”

It’s important to keep the videos short so health-care professionals can quickly digest the information, said Topps.

“Most instructional videos in the past tended to be 20 minutes to an hour long. They were lectures on video,” he said.

“We’re trying to use the video for the stuff that matters. You put the moving bits of what you’re trying to teach into the video and you put everything else onto a website or other non-video information.”

Pocket Snips may also be useful to fully-trained doctors and nurses working in remote areas of Northern Ontario, said Joyce Helmer, section leader for clinical education at NOSM’s east campus and chair of Cambrian College’s Wabnode Institute.

Health-care professionals working in these communities are often called upon to perform procedures that they wouldn’t normally encounter in cities, she said. The videos can be downloaded for free by anyone from the Pocket Snips website.

“There was a new physician working up north who had to remove a tooth. What he actually did was leave the patient in the exam room and read up on the procedure in a book. Then he went back and did the procedure,” Helmer said.

“These (videos) are an important educational resource for the north. We’re short of physicians and health-care providers, and we practice in rural and remote communities. These (videos) will be invaluable in those settings.”

www.pocketsnips.org