I need your help to improve medical training and save animals. Sanford Health, operating in the Dakotas and headquartered in my home state of Sioux Falls, S.D., is the last remaining medical center in the country still using animals in its trauma training course.
The course is known as Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS) and is run by Sanford Medical Center Fargo and conducted at North Dakota State University. It involves cutting into pigs to teach invasive procedures. Trainees make incisions and insert tubes and needles into an animal's chest cavity, abdomen, throat, and the sac surrounding the heart. But this practice is completely out of step with modern standards of medical training. In fact, among the 385 accredited programs surveyed, Sanford's is the only one in the U.S. or Canada still using animals. Programs elsewhere in the Dakotas—at Altru Health Systems, St. Alexius Medical Center, Avera McKennan Hospital, and courses run by the South Dakota ATLS Taskforce—use only nonanimal training methods.
The American College of Surgeons, which developed and accredits ATLS courses, has endorsed the replacement of animals with simulation for training since 2001. Yet, more than two decades later, only Sanford continues to kill pigs for use in ATLS training. It's obvious that Sanford Health is behind the times.
Sanford's ongoing failure to keep up with modern training methods is a disservice both to trainees and to their future patients. Dakotans deserve medical training that is consistent with national standards, human-relevant, and humane. Please join us by telling Sanford Health that NOW is the time to banish this animal use to the history books!
Ronald Cohen, MD
Sioux Falls, S.D.
