Driving by the CTE Academy on April 30th, you would’ve seen many fire trucks, ambulances, and overall a bunch of commotion. Thankfully, though, all those EMS vehicles weren’t there for a real emergency, but instead for a mass casualty simulation put on by the EMT teacher, Mrs. Dummond, at CTE to help the EMT students, fire cadets, and future nurses from Southeast Tech get better hands-on training on what to do in a real mass casualty situation.
This is an all-day event across all three CTE blocks, featuring three different mass casualty scenarios, with EMT students taking turns in three different “response areas.” The CTE students also have the opportunity to be patients and get to wear prosthetic makeup and injuries to make the day seem even more real. The block would run like this: the mass casualty would start, and the firefighters/cadets would partner up with the first smaller group of EMT students to go around and “triage” the patients. They would triage them by putting different colors of tape on them, depending on the severity of their injuries. Then they would find a way to extract the patient from wherever they were found and bring them down to the “treatment” area of the building. Then there is another smaller group of firefighters/cadets who would split up the patients again, depending on the severity of their injuries, and they then would begin to treat them. Finally, the patients would be moved by another smaller group of firefighters/cadets who were in charge of “transport” to an ambulance or an ambu bus (a bus for multiple patients with less severe injuries). They would then be transported right over to the Southeast Campus Sim Lab, where the nursing students had a real-life experience working in an Emergency Department during a mass casualty.
The EMT students had been preparing and practicing their skills for this day, practicing hands-on skills like packing a wound or applying a splint. They had also been practicing extracting people from cars in the automotive classroom and loading patients into an ambulance. Alexis Binfet was one of the EMT students helping on mass casualty day. When asked what she thought about the day, she replied, “I enjoyed it. It gave me a real-life example of what it’s like being an EMT, even if situations like that are less likely to happen.” She was then asked if all the preparation they had done beforehand made her feel ready. She stated, “Yeah, I felt ready. I think we were given and taught everything we needed to succeed, and we were kind of given an idea of what it was going to be like and what we would need to do.”
This event is a great training simulation for all future EMS personnel and will hopefully continue through the following years at CTE.
