Pioneers: Salamango and Belle Pass ACLS

Our very own MCIRCC Catalyst Team members, Mark Salamango and Ashwin Belle, PhD are the very first non care workers at U-M to not only attempt, but successfully complete, the American Heart Association’s Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support (ACLS) course.

“Apart from the use of basic CPR and AED, ACLS also taught us the ability to recognize several life-threatening cardiopulmonary emergencies, critical actionable thinking and decision-making strategies. Through instruction and active participation the ACLS course armed us with skills in differential diagnosis and treatment of prearrest, arrest and postarrest patients”, said Ashwin.

In the past for Mark and Ashwin, communicating with both clinicians and engineers has proven challenging considering these two “tribes” speak very different languages.

“A clinician may use the word ‘protocol’ to describe a set of steps they are going to use in an experiment, but that same word used by an engineer may refer to a technical way of exchanging data from one computer to another”, said Mark. “Add to that, medical jargon, acronyms, and other clinical references, and there can be a huge communication gap between clinicians and engineers. This gap was something that Ashwin and I were keen to remove or even diminish slightly.”

After completing the course, both say that they have a better understanding of the vast amount of medical data they deal with every day and that it has improved their ability to communicate more proficiently with MCIRCC’s clinical partners.

Well done Mark and Ashwin!