The Gold Coast University Hospital’s had on November 29 a mass casualty exercise using Emergo Train System (ETS). The scenario was a semi-trailer crashed through barriers into temporary grandstands at a motorsport event and resulted in 120 people (from the ETS trauma bank) were brought to hospitals. The aim of the exercise was to develop the Gold Coast University Hospital’s capability to work intraoperably to manage the response to a surge event in accordance with the Emergency Preparedness Continuity Management plan and Mass Casualty plans.
It was an in-hospital exercise only so the exercise started from the point of arrival to ED. All departments were involved; emergency, theatres, intensive care units – adult and paediatrics, inpatient units – surgical and medical some of which participated for the first time in an exercise. The exercise ran for 3 hours and 120 patients from the ETS trauma victim bank were injected into the exercise over that time.
Some of the objectives of the exercises was:
- practice the decant of emergency department in line with the ED Mass Casualty plan
- review capability to create inpatient capacity as per the Capacity Matrix
- review the ability of the emergency department treatment of immediate casualty management with no preventable deaths and preventable complications
- review the capability of theatre, surgery and intensive care staff to plan for immediate and future casualty management
- explore the capability to surge within inpatient areas
Impressive more than 200 participated in the exercise which was assisted by more than 20 instructors!
