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Trauma outreach team at Seven Oaks Innovation Week: Feb 29th - 4th March

February 22, 2016

Next weekend the Trauma team will be packing up the car with platelets, red blood cells, fibrin and the trauma mannequin ready for the start of Sevenoaks Innovation Week 2016 (Feb 29th to 4th March). Here the team will be talking all things trauma to hundreds of school children from Sevenoaks School and the surrounding area. Research assistant Scarlett Gillespie explains what's in store:

"The team use various props to talk about the medicine, surgery, research and clinical trials that C4TS are involved in. Always a big crowd pleaser is the trauma simulator mannequin – the patient. Using the mannequin gives the team the opportunity to talk through the changes in physiology that follow a traumatic injury. Heart rate, blood pressure, oxygenation levels and breathing rate are monitored in order to follow the patients changing condition. These observations are overseen by a pupil ‘anaesthetist’, and reported to the rest of the group – the surgeons, in order to demonstrate how these observations can indicate the presence of bleeding in the patients. Whilst this is going on, the ‘surgeons’ work hard - under the watchful eye of a trauma lead from C4TS – to try and find the bleeding vessels within the abdomen and stem the bleeding.

The trauma mannequin is very popular with school children

Alongside this, we use a model blood vessel in order to build a blood clot. Using fibrin, platelets, red blood cells and enzymes, the team talk through the cascade of events that leads to the formation of a blood clot. The model encourages pupils to reflect on the importance of blood clotting in trauma patients and the possible reasons why blood may not clot in trauma patients

Together, these props allow the team to talk through many aspects of trauma research that C4TS are involved in such as the trials we run in order to further investigate these issues.

Our presence at Innovation Week 2016 will be the third consecutive year the trauma team has attended Sevenoaks School to engage with many pupils and teachers alike. Last year was a great success, and we hope that this year will continue with the same momentum. All tickets for the team's event have already been filled and we look forward to the fun ahead!

Later in the year, the team will be developing the activities further to give greater prominence to the many strands of research within C4TS, and how they are vital to improving treatments for trauma patients."

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