The St.Emlyn’s Podcast Ep 277 - Cognitive HALOs and Advanced Simulation Training with Halden Hutchinson-Bazely at BASICs 2025
Dec 6, 2025
Haldon "Hutch" Hutchinson-Bazely, an intensive care and pre-hospital medicine doctor, discusses his transformative experiences in emergency situations. He shares gripping insights from a harrowing traumatic cardiac arrest encounter, where he faced cognitive overload alone. Hutch presents techniques like 'lighting a flare' to manage stress and decision-making. The conversation dives into the importance of high-fidelity simulation training in preparing clinicians for high-stakes scenarios, and small-scale methods to make such training accessible globally.
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Solo Traumatic Arrest Under Intense Strain
- Haldon "Hutch" Hutchinson-Bazely described arriving alone at a dark traumatic cardiac arrest with only a police officer present and traffic on both sides of the road.
- He felt intensely clear yet mentally stretched to the point of running out of decision-making capacity and had to create space to continue helping.
The Cognitive 'Engine' Metaphor
- Hutch compared cognitive overload to a helicopter engine pushed to maximum power until it falters, illustrating limits of sustained mental performance.
- Recognizing that limit lets clinicians create deliberate space to avoid performance collapse.
Signal, Normalize, And Offload
- Light a flare: signal for help immediately so the system knows you need support.
- Norm the abnormal by performing routine actions and deliberately drop tasks you cannot safely achieve to free mental bandwidth.