MDA israel

MDA's Training Department is one of the organization's busiest, teaching and training over 360,000 people last year, ranging from MDA's youth, employees and volunteers, EMTs and paramedics, to training the general public and other healthcare professionals such as doctors and nurses in hospitals and clinics.

The training department began development on a program – "Training 2020" to take training and education into a more technology-based environment back in 2017, and when the Covid-19 pandemic hit early in 2020 leading to lockdowns and social distancing, this program was given a boost in order to enable training to continue in an online format.

Prior to this, MDA was already employing hybrid teaching in Bar Ilan University, led by Noam Orlinsky, a senior MDA paramedic and educator, teaching classes by video.

For the past nine years, the Holon Institute of Technology (HIT) has held an educational technology conference that includes a competition for developing new technology. Snir Fainshtein, a student at HIT, is also an MDA paramedic and coordinator of the online education unit. Snir decided that it would be important to enter the competition and introduce the giant leaps in the field that have been taken over the past two years, showcasing the leading technology MDA is developing in the study of emergency medicine.

Magen David Adom entered the competition, proudly introducing the other competition members to the range of educational technology that have been introduced to MDA staff over the past two years, partially due to the influence of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Several educational technology products were presented at the competition.

There is the Virtual Reality system, a project led by paramedics and engineers Yuval Eran and Illi Milwerger, that has caused a revolution, allowing MDA staff to learn about the work of the mobile intensive care units (MICUs) and improve the knowledge and skills in a virtual setting, allowing them to translate that virtual knowledge into reality in the field.

There is also the MDAcademy app, another project led by Fainshtein. It has downloaded by thousands of people, allowing anyone from youth volunteers to paramedics, to undertake theoretical study at both a basic life support (BLS) and advanced life support (ALS) level. As well as theory, the app provides training scenarios at all levels and also provides feedback to help the learning process.

Finally, the concept of the online training unit was also presented at the competition. This unit, developed during and because of the repeated lockdowns during the recent pandemic, works night and day to improve the training abilities of Magen David Adom, and allows staff and volunteers to improve and increase their skill and knowledge base, as well as allowing members of the general public to learn how to save lives on a daily basis.

To date, Magen David Adom has over 400 pre-recorded training videos in several languages, both for health care professionals as well as the general public, and is as constantly undertaking live online teaching, training and education.