Mass Casualty Drill at OU Gives Medical Personnel Valuable Field Training

Chris Howell NewsOn6.com

TULSA---Bloodied victims, sirens, and emergency personnel made for a confusing scene this morning at The Oklahoma School of Community Medicine at 41^st and Yale. The scenario was an elaborate drill played-out to give first responders experience in dealing with a mass casualty event.

‘We do a mock concert where a bomb goes off when students are there,' said Brandi King, Assistant Director of the Oklahoma Institute of Disaster and Emergency Medicine at the OU School of Community Medicine, ‘one of the things we like to teach is building networks, a standard communication for disasters. In a disaster your need is greater than your resources, so we try to teach them how to think and adjust in those situations with people they've never worked with before.'

After the drill the students, first responders and those holding the event were debriefed and were told what they did right and the areas needing improvement. This type of drills not only provides a chance to practice medicine during a disaster, it provides valuable perspective for the first responders.

‘It makes them think about how different they start their job everyday when they get up in the morning,' said Brandi.