Mayo Clinic Saving Lives With Gus Project Aims to Educate, Save Lives

Mayo Clinic has launched a new video series, Saving Lives With Gus, which is designed to educate, entertain and deliver life-saving tips with high-tech mannequins. The series will be made available to media outlets as well as straight to the public through social media channels.

David Farley, M.D. , who oversees training at the Multidisciplinary Simulation Center in Minnesota, was touched a few years ago by the tragic story of a high school athlete who died after making the winning shot in a basketball game. It was determined later that he suffered from underlying cardiomyopathy. An Automated External Defibrillator, AED, was used to save the boy’s life, but there were reports that the batteries may have been dead. This event inspired the first video in the Saving Lives With Gus series.

Dr. Farley credits his three teenagers for showing him the educational power of social media. “Through them, I saw an opportunity to reach a new generation and deliver a succinct health care message to thousands of people through platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.”

Dr. Farley co-directs the new Simulation Medicine Fellowship program with William Dunn, M.D., and challenged his research trainees to develop novel approaches to engage millennial learners, giving them the goal of saving the life of at least one person a year through the simulation center.

Research fellow Raaj Ruparel, M.D., M.B.B.S., accepted the challenge, produced a prototype and is now the host of Saving Lives With Gus. “This is a natural extension of our hands-on training and knowledge from The SIM Center that will benefit our generation,” Dr. Ruparel says.

Research fellow Yazan AlJamal, producer of the series, is passionate about medicine and multimedia production. “Producing these one-minute videos is stimulating and rewarding, and we are establishing a platform that will hopefully exceed the life-saving goal Dr. Farley has given us.” The next two Saving Lives With Gus videos demonstrate how to save choking victims, with different methods for adults and children.

The weekly 60-second Saving Lives With Gus video vignettes will be released every Thursday on the Mayo Clinic News Network. Follow the conversation on Twitter at #SavingLivesWithGus.