Learning to handle emergencies
Response’s role in mass casualty events cited
PALMDALE — Eightynine Highland and Palmdale high school emergency medical technician students gathered Wednesday in the parking lot of Palmdale High’s football stadium for a mock mass casualty event to demonstrate the role of the EMT response with multiple victims that can overwhelm a local healthcare system in such an event.
Thirty-eight Highland High students were bused to Palmdale High, where they worked with the Palmdale High students. The incident for the demonstration was two car collisions. An initial scene had two vans crash into each other and a secondary scene had one vehicle crash. There was 50 victims in total: 16 command staff; and 23 EMT teams of two.
Eric McIntyre, an EMT instructor in Palmdale High’s Health Careers Academy, and Christy Chacon, coordinator of Highland High’s Public Service Academy, oversaw the event. “This was a training event, so part of being an EMT is di- saster management, respond- ing to mass casualty incidents, and so this simulated a mass casualty event,” McIntyre said. “And the most common one that EMTs will face is some type of vehicle collision, and so that’s what we simulated here.” The EMT students practiced skills such as splinting, spinal immobilization and gurney mechanics. Students assigned to triage assessed each patient from most severe to least severe. The student “victims” were placed on color-coded plastic tarps based on the assessment of their injuries. About 20 student patients were placed on the red tarp for the most severe cases not involving death. The yellow tarps for the “delayed”
victims and the green tarps are for minor injuries.
The students also used radio communications to coordinate their efforts.
McIntyre served as the dispatcher.
“We had to theoretically contact hospitals to see how many patients that they could take,” he said.
McIntyre praised the students’ efforts.
“They did better than I thought they would,” he said. “They were very nervous at first, but they eventually settled in and they started thinking more about their roles. It was still kind of bumpy, but they did pretty well. They actually finished this event earlier than I thought they would.”
Highland High senior Lincoln Roebuck and Palmdale High senior Xitlaly Vazquez served as incident commanders. Both have previously served as incident commanders.
“Incident commander’s basically just like the puppet-master,” Roebuck said. “You’re constantly talking to dispatch, to staging, to transport, to triage. You’re just talking to everybody making sure everybody’s in line and doing what you want them to do.
“I think everybody did so good. I’m very happy with how this turned out.”
Vazquez also had a positive assessment for the incident.
“I think they did great,” she said. “It was kind of a delay with communication because I didn’t have a walkie talkie, but we communicated really good and everyone kind of put in their work that they knew what they were doing.”
Palmdale High senior Chloe Carlson served as an EMT officer for the red tarp.
“We send in our staging officers first and triage and they do a head count of how many immediate, delayed and green tags there are and then they send them to us for treatment,” she said.
The red tarp ended up with about 20 patients. Patients can move from yellow to red.
“We access based on consciousness, so if they’re unconscious, they’re typically going to go first,” she said. “Major bleeding and then the ones who are more just fractures will go later, but unconscious, mental status, that type of thing is assessed first.”
She also gave a positive assessment of the exercise.
“I think we all did extremely well, especially coming from two different schools. We were able to work together even though some of our terminology was a bit different,” she said.
Asked to provide an example of different terminology used by the students, the Palmdale High students calls the soft stretcher tarp used to carry patients a “litter” while the Highland High students called it a “tummy tarp.”
“We figured everything out,” she said. “We’ve done stuff like this before: I think this is the best one.”
Highland High senior Amariss Hull served as the transportation coordinator.
“My role was transport, so I had to communicate with treatment and staging just trying to see where we’re going to transport the patients and what colors, which one was more immediate,” she said.
Hull gave a positive assessment of the exercise.
“I think we all worked really well together,” she said. “We communicated well.”
Ninth-grader Gabriela Lopez played a “victim” for the event. Lopez is a student in Palmdale High’s Health Careers Academy. She “sustained” a head injury in the incident. “I had to be delirious,” she said. Palmdale High seniors Marissa Navarro, Julianna Kastiel and Angel Pereppadaln attended to Lopez during the event.
“I learned how important it is to have people in your group that you can rely on,” Kastiel said. “You need to work as a team; it’s really important because you’re not going to be able to get stuff done if you’re not working together.”