Future paramedics in the West Midlands are jumping into a state-of-the-art virtual driving seat to enhance their blue light driving skills as they prepare to begin saving lives.
The driving simulator, that is the first of its kind amongst ambulance trust's in the UK, is allowing students at West Midlands Ambulance Service to undertake their Emergency Blue Light Driving course to prepare for driving in a multitude of scenarios that could occur while driving an ambulance under emergency conditions.
The driving simulator, that is the first of its kind amongst ambulance trust's in the UK, is allowing students at West Midlands Ambulance Service to undertake their Emergency Blue Light Driving course to prepare for driving in a multitude of scenarios that could occur while driving an ambulance under emergency conditions.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Hello, I'm Russell, I'm a driver trainer here at West Midlands Ambulance Service.
00:08This is our new driver simulator.
00:10We're the first ambulance service in the country to have a simulator like this.
00:15This allows us to simulate circumstances which you can't predict in real life,
00:19such as people walking out, animals walking out into the road, vehicle breakdowns, poor weather,
00:26and situations where you might have to drive down the motorway the wrong way to attend an incident,
00:31which we cannot practically demonstrate or practice in a real world setting.
00:36This will give the learners the opportunity to experience incidents they've never experienced before
00:41and how to deal with them.
00:43Each learner has an hour's practice on the simulator.
00:46This doesn't take them away from driving driver training units on live roads within the public setting.
00:53It enhances the learning experience.
00:57This allows our learners to have a prepared edge when they do become operational
01:01and attend incidents in a real life setting.