LLU Senior Healthcare Students Prepare for Emergency Medical Situations

LOMA LINDA >> Loma Linda University (LLU) was able to respond to the San Bernardino Terrorist Attack that occurred this past December very quickly and strategically. The preparedness of the LLU medical staff resulted in readily available crash carts, triage tents, and countless medical supplies set up for mass casualties and it only took 18 minutes to do so. As part of medical students’ educational curricula, LLU has put together a course that trains their students how to be “effective responders in mass casualty and disaster events”. This past week, Monday, May 9 through Friday, May 13, LLU’s senior class of health care students participated in integral coursework in order to train for these disaster situations. According to Tae Kim, M.D., course director, the program has been ongoing since 2004. However, they recently expanded the course in order to include other disciplines like nursing, pharmacy, allied Hhalth, and dentistry. “We may not have asked for something like last December to happen to us but what we can do is prepare for it, train for it, and choose how we respond,” Kim added. “It’s not that this half day course will make [students] experts in disaster medicine or emergency care but you can imagine that [they] are going to feel a whole lot better than people who’ve never had this kind of experience before.” There were three different courses the students had to endure: triage, “SIMS”, and decontamination. Triage consisted of a brief instruction about how to determine the severity of victims. It’s important to be able to determine which people have the most severe injuries; therefore, they use different colored tags to make it easier. Once the person is quickly evaluated, the student will determine if the are a red, yellow, or green. Red, being the most severe was described as someone that would most likely die if not taken to the hospital quickly enough. Yellow was in the middle, not as severe as the red but more severe than the green. Each student was to approach this course as if each scenario was a disaster or emergency situation, the course did not fail to showcase a realistic event. After being briefly trained on which victims should receive which colors based on the severity of the injuries, they were put to a test. Some of the students were given triage kits and entered a separate room that was staged as the aftermath of a mass shooting. The scenario was that a husband went on a shooting spree and killed himself after shooting and injuring a lot of people, including his wife and baby. The students’ job was to respond to the tragedy in the most effective way possible by checking every single person in the room, determine the severity of their injuries by assigning them the appropriate color. The scenario was very realistic as the “victims” of the disaster were paid actors. Once the doors opened to the room, the victims were screaming and holding their realistic wounds while crying for help. The next course was “SIMS”, it was held in the simulation lab. One of the scenarios was also a paid actress that was detoxing and the students had to deal with treating her even though she kept resisting in a very unpleasant manner. In the room next to her was a mannequin that simulated real-life symptoms. The mannequin or patient had a hydrofluoric acid burn. The group of students had to act fast by reading his vitals, calling and administering certain medication as if the mannequin was a real person fighting for his life. The last course was located outside. Students were taught about the procedures of decontamination. Most of the students had to try on HAZMAT (hazardous material) suits, and got a hands-on experience with the decontamination process as they washed and cleaned a mannequin that was ‘exposed’ to hazardous chemicals.