Mass casualty drill at Lee University helps students prepare for the worst

Staff photo by C.B. Schmelter / Hannah Green, left, Elizabeth Cope and Alexandria Reuter carry a simulated victim during a mass casualty drill outside of the School of Nursing on the campus of Lee University on Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2019 in Cleveland, Tenn. Green, a junior nursing major, was acting as an emergency medical technician. Both Cope and Reuter are first-year masters students in the athletic training program. The simulated mass casualty drill allows students to practice their clinical skills in response to a surge of patients coming into a health care facility for treatment of their injuries under accelerated stress levels.
Staff photo by C.B. Schmelter / Hannah Green, left, Elizabeth Cope and Alexandria Reuter carry a simulated victim during a mass casualty drill outside of the School of Nursing on the campus of Lee University on Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2019 in Cleveland, Tenn. Green, a junior nursing major, was acting as an emergency medical technician. Both Cope and Reuter are first-year masters students in the athletic training program. The simulated mass casualty drill allows students to practice their clinical skills in response to a surge of patients coming into a health care facility for treatment of their injuries under accelerated stress levels.

An emergency department can go from quiet to chaotic in minutes. That was the scenario as Lee University students practiced applying their skills from the classroom during a mass casualty drill Wednesday.

Injured victims lay scattered across the lawn outside the School of Nursing, which served as a "hospital" for patients needing treatment from injuries due to multiple bomb explosions designed to mimic the Boston Marathon bombings. "Patients" began flooding the "emergency department:" A female spectator with shrapnel in her arm, one with an eye injury, a pregnant woman with blunt-force trauma to the head, a runner with a severe spinal cord injury.

Wesley Green, a senior nursing student at Lee who was acting as the charge nurse, said about 20 people rushed the pretend emergency department with ailments ranging from traumatic head and eye injuries to seizures and a stroke.

"It's just a lot of thinking on your feet," Green said. "The biggest challenge is having the multiple waves of multiple patients and not having somewhere to put them."

Senior nursing student Ana Vazquez has participated in prior drills and knows from experience how to control her adrenaline in the moment.

"You sink or you swim. Either you can go with the chaos, or you just get controlled by the chaos," Vazquez said.

As the emergency department was overrun with injured patients, hysterical family members - played by theatre majors - gathered outside, where psychology and pastoral students helped them process their emotions.

Brenda Jones, assistant professor of nursing at Lee, said the drill tests students pursuing degrees in areas tasked with responding during mass casualty events. In addition to using clinical skills, the drill requires teamwork, decision making and communication skills in a high-stress situation.

At the scene, athletic trainers triaged and put casts on "broken limbs," as journalism students questioned officials and gathered information to write "news stories."

"We make sure our students get what they need out of this event," Jones said.

Students from the School of Nursing included nursing majors - a four-year bachelor's program at Lee - and students from the new disaster and health care mission management program, a non-nursing bachelor's degree that started in fall 2018.

Jones said professors begin meeting in August to prepare for the annual event. In the past, they've simulated bus crashes, a trail derailment and natural disasters.

"This is really like an inter-professional collaborative event," she said.

Vazquez, who wants to go into critical care or emergency nursing, said the drill is a great way to get hard-to-come-by experience.

"It's very rare that we will ever happen to be at the hospital when a mass casualty happens," she said. "Doing this kind of prepares you I need to trust my knowledge, trust my skills and act accordingly."

Contact Elizabeth Fite at efite@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6673.

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