There’s a two-vehicle collision. Firefighters and paramedics scramble to transport a pair of victims to medical care as quickly as possible. Police control the scene. Medical staff await the arrival of the injured.
One victim screams in pain as he is pulled from his vehicle. The other, not as badly injured, says the other driver ran a stop sign as a paramedic takes notes.
This is the scenario that took place at Northern College during a mock disaster on Friday, Feb. 28. The event provided hands-on training for students at the Timmins campus in the nursing, preservice firefighter, paramedic and police foundations programs.
Sarah Campbell, Dean of Health Sciences and Emergency Services at Northern College, said the scenario took some time to prepare but was worth the effort.
“It takes a tremendous amount of work,” she said. “Our co-ordinators and faculty have been working on this for months.
“It’s a matter of pulling together all the learning objectives from both programs, matching that up and coming up with a scenario that is appropriate, that really maximizes what the students have learned to date and gives them a true interprofessional learning experience.”
The students were pumped up for the experience.
“Our students obviously spend a lot of time doing theory and labs, but this is a real opportunity to put into action what they’ve learned so far,” Campbell said. “It’s also an opportunity for them to interact with each other and learn the different roles that they have and what they will do in that scenario when it happens in real life.
“It’s a way to show off the fact that we’re a really innovative college and have this amazing facility, the Integrated Emergency Services Complex. It provides students from all over Ontario a real emerging, innovative way to learn, and I think that’s the direction we need to go for our students, particularly in health sciences and emergency services.”
Mack Pettigrew, course co-ordinator for Police Foundations at Northern College, said it was an opportunity for students from different programs to see how to interact with other branches of emergency services.
“It’s integrating all the emergency services we have at the college and it’s showing how they can work together and how they hand off patients to one another,” he said. “For police foundations and the firefighting, we do hands-on with scenario type of training. This is just putting all that training into use at the one time.”
It is also an opportunity for instructors to evaluate the performance of the students.
“Just to see if the training that they’ve had so far, are they putting it to use,” Pettigrew said. “It shows me if there is a lax some where they have to improve upon.
“After this scenario, we’ll do a debriefing, as we do in all of ours. It gives us a chance for all of us to speak together and say ‘did we do really well and what can we do better.’”
While the mock disaster simulated the scene of a serious collision, all the students had to respond as if it was a real call that just came in. Their adrenaline was pumping.
“It gives them that real-life scenario situation where the blood gets going and your blood pressure goes up,” he explained. “So, it really gives them a good idea, rather than just learning from a book. You get to see first-hand what it’s like.”
As far as student performance was concerned, Pettigrew liked what he saw during the mock disaster.
“From what I’ve seen so far today, the training has kicked in and they’ve all done a great job,” he said.
