Models for teaching emergency medicine skills

Abstract

Teaching and retaining psychomotor skills presents problems in emergency medicine. A variety of models, including animals, plastic models, paid or unpaid volunteers, patients recently pronounced dead, and cadavers (the bodies of people who donate their bodies to science), have been developed to alleviate this problem. Practical and ethical concerns in using these models are discussed, with an emphasis on the cadaver model and on those procedures that are best taught on cadavers.