The blood will be fake.
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| Instructor Tony Belcher (in white, third from right) oversees second-year EMS students who’ll be participating in Southwestern Community College’s fifth-annual Disaster Drill later this month. They include Cameron Taylor of Sylva (center/patient), and from left: Elizabeth Dippy (Waynesville), Delores Sparks (Webster), Alicia Lambert (Cherokee), Jacob Bingham (Franklin), Becky Turner (Sylva), Sam Myers (Murphy), Amanda Howard, Beau Schneider (Whittier) and Ricky Marr (Waynesville). (Photo by Mark Hasket |
So will the bullet wounds, broken limbs and other “injuries” that descend upon Southwestern Community College’s Jackson Campus later this month.
Though the college’s Balsam Center will be filled with all manner of “casualties” on Oct. 25, the fifth-annual “Disaster Drill” is no cause for alarm.
It’s all about getting prepared.
“This gives the second-year students in all our health-science programs some exposure to a mass-casualty disaster response,” said Eric Hester, coordinator of SCC’s Emergency Medical Science program.
“You can never plan too much for a disaster,” added Hester, who’s worked in the field for 27 years and still serves several shifts a month as a field medic. “Our students have already learned what to do, but this gives them a chance to apply those skills. It could be anything from a large wreck with multiple casualties all the way up to something like what happened on 9/11. The more exposure you have to these types of situations, the more it’ll help when you’re out in the field.”
At approximately 8 a.m., the Balsam Center will transform into a command and triage center. Students in each Health Science program will coordinate the diagnosis, care and treatment for each “patient” who comes through.
Radiography students, for example, will perform X-Rays to determine the extent of injuries while aspiring Nurses tend to patients’ most immediate needs. Human Services Technology students will counsel and provide comfort to victims and their next of kin even as Hester’s class delivers more casualties.
Kyle Dowling, a 2012 graduate of Southwestern’s EMS program, said the Disaster Drill in which he participated as a student helped prepare him for his current role as a paramedic for MedWest EMS in Sylva.
“You never want the first time you experience something like that to be the real thing in the field,” Dowling said. “So to have that training to fall back on is a huge plus.”
Hester added: “You don’t realize the stress involved in a real-life scenario with actual patients depending on you to get them to the right care at the right place and the right time. It’s easy to be overwhelmed, especially if you’ve not had a drill like this before. Going through this will make our students a little more comfortable when they find themselves in an actual experience like this. It’ll make the correct response a little more second-nature for all of them.”
