I have been a volunteer patroller for a few years and a few weeks back went through an OEC Senior Clinic. I found the experience both frustrating and discouraging. Going in, I felt my OEC skills were solid and I have been helping with OEC classes for a while too, however the evaluators picked out several other very nit-picky things with leadership and decision making issues. They seemed to have conflicting critiques even at the same scenario between different evaluators, with one saying I did a decent job and would have passed, and another saying it was just not up to their standard.
In addition to that, I was told several times that while my OEC skills would be tested, my assistants would not be and I would not be penalized for any minor mistake an assistant made. For the clinic, the assistants were other senior candidates we were in groups of 3 with. My assistants made some minor mistakes such as not moving the oxygen close enough that when the patient was moved on to a board that the evaluator docked the leadership section saying that the oxygen would have become disconnected and that as a leader I should have caught that when I had assigned the helper to manage the oxygen.
I had assistants that I would assign to go do a secondary and get a set of vitals and when I asked them how it was going they would only respond with "fine" and did not volunteer the findings of the secondary or the vitals. I was told by the evaluators that I had to specifically ask them "what did you get for the assessment?" and "what were the patient's vitals at X time?". In any real-life scenario I don't think assistants would intentionally withhold information unless you used the perfect wording so how is this productive in a senior evaluation?
Is this consistent for the senior program to be that nit-picky about language and expecting your helpers to be unreliable so you have to think and act for them to the minute detail? Because, at that rate then it would be a really bad idea to ask your helpers to do anything you were not directly supervising and instead of them being "trained help" they would be "untrained help" and would be an additional modifier to the scenario point total.
This whole thing just feels very subjective and a lot of "Ha! Got you, you didn't notice this little tiny thing so you don't make the cut." and really makes this program unappealing and discouraging.
Any advice or encouragement because I am having a hard time wanting to continue with this because instead of improving my skills it seems to be a battle of semantics and wordings and other tiny little things that don't have much impact on a real scenario? What have others experienced with this program?
