MERIDIAN — The blood, while fake, looked pretty convincing, staining the asphalt in the parking lot.
A man was lying unconscious on his back with a red gash on his forehead.
The medical students in training asked any festival-goers who could hear them and were able to walk to come to a central grassy area. Other students went to the injured who remained on the ground, assessed their injuries and determined the level of medical attention they needed.
Within five minutes, the students had assessed everyone’s need for treatment. But their answer was just beginning.
“Please save my baby!” said a woman sitting in the grass, rubbing her belly, with two red ribbons tied in her hair.
Thus began the first mass casualty incident training at the Idaho College of Osteopathic Medicine. Over 100 participants participated in the study, including over 20 patients with prosthetic injuries and 15 assessors.
The situation? A “confused music festival” where drugs cause medical complications leading to possible crashes and individual health problems, explained Mohammad Abuakar, a third-year ICOM student and organizer of the event.
Cosmetology students from Paul Mitchell School locations in Boise and Nampa provided the makeup, while students in paramedic training volunteered as patients.
Mass casualty incidents can include mass shootings, extreme weather conditions and emerging infectious diseases, according to an ICOM press release on the event.
The COVID-19 pandemic was a mass casualty incident as it quickly overwhelmed medical resources and required a concerted effort to deal with it, Abuakar said in the release.
“It is imperative that we expose our future physicians to MCIs so they know how to properly manage one in the hospital and support our first responders in the process,” Abuakar said in the release.
At the event, Abuakar, who worked as a paramedic, said he planned the event for 16 months to provide his peers with a real-world scenario they could face in their careers.
“I feel like I have this obligation to make sure my classmates know there’s a pre-hospital component, what they do, how things work, and hopefully they realize they’re part of a team so they can really know how to respond,” said he.
In a mass casualty incident, there are usually more people in need of medical attention than there are medical professionals available, said Richard McDonald, assistant professor of emergency medicine at ICOM.
“So you have to do the best for as many people as possible,” he said.
The word “triage” means sorting patients according to how urgent their needs are in a way that allows for most survivors.
The medical students were “trained to do a quick assessment,” MacDonald said, going through the patients in the parking lot to determine who they could save and who they should withhold help.
In addition to learning how to assess patients, the students had to endure other stresses, such as dealing with the patients themselves and their relatives.
A patient walking around the lawn pretending to go live on social media pointed his phone at a medical student, asking if they had taken care of a person still lying in the parking lot.
A short time later, another patient waiting for help on the lawn started yelling at one of the medical students.
“Her brother and my husband, no one looked at them. Are you the boss here?” she asked in disbelief.
Eventually, the actor-patients were ushered inside the building’s second floor, which consists of simulation hospital rooms, including two emergency rooms separated by a control room where college professors monitor vital signs and other information that is relayed to the rooms , and watching students react through one-way glass.
In one of the emergency rooms, a medical mannequin had replaced the actor of the pregnant patient. Now she was going into labor, and pre-recorded, agonized cries could be heard from the room.
Meanwhile, a nearby larger room was set up to treat patients with minor injuries. A man with wet grass stains on the knees of his jeans described trying cocaine for the first time and said he also occasionally used alcohol and marijuana. His chest was pounding.
“I don’t know how to describe it,” he said. “I’ve never had anything like it.”
Medical students performed an electrocardiogram by taping electrodes to his bare chest to assess his heart.
In the patient ward next door, a woman with dry grass clinging to her shins and fake blood on her forearms tearfully told her attendants that she wanted someone to help her brother.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” she said, “I’m so confused.”
McDonald said the students deserve a huge amount of credit for running such a compelling, educational simulation.
“They don’t do this anywhere else,” McDonald said, adding that several other medical schools have made much less successful attempts in recent years.
“I just really commend these students for their effort, their imagination, their enthusiasm and their willingness to put in the extra time because they’re still … medical students — it’s not easy,” MacDonald said.
