“I can’t over-emphasize how many people get involved in this. Everybody is involved. It’s all hands-on deck and we do that in the exercise so we’re ready for real world,” said David Gerstner, Dayton Fire Department, regional MMRS coordinator.
Multiple agencies and over 50 actors took part in the drill at Kiser Elementary School in Dayton with simulated gunshots, explosions and actors in makeup portraying to be injured students.
The exercise is designed to simulate a real-world emergency scenario involving mass causalities to help evaluate and strengthen the hospital’s response protocols, and those of police, fire and EMS. It is also test the effectiveness of the Hospital Incident Command System, enhance coordination with each team, and make sure staff and prepared and confident in responding to a critical incident.
The MMRS bases these exercises on multiple real world events such as the Las Vegas Harvest Route 91 shooting, the Orlando Pulse shooting, the ramming attack in New Orleans and multiple others, Gerstner said.
“We try to learn from what went well and what was problematic at those incidents and then fold that into these exercises so that our emergency department physicians and nurses and multiple other hospital personnel as well as fire EMS and law enforcement can respond to these things and test out their responses,” he said.
During the drill, a police officer roleplays as the suspect who is marked “so nobody can make a mistake and think he’s really a shooter,” Gerstner said. Law enforcement responds, finds the suspect and stops the shooting and killing. A rescue task force and EMS then works to stop the dying and starts care inside the scene before victims go outside for further treatment and being taken to the hospital.
“Law enforcement’s first response is never to shoot someone unless there’s no option. In some of these situations you have to stop the killing and if that’s the only way to do that, our law enforcement is prepared to do what’s needed but if they can take the person into custody, that’s preferable,” Gerstner added.
At this point, the Hospital Incident Command System is activated at Dayton Children’s Hospital, which is the system that supports any mass casualty drill, as personnel work to look at the overall picture and puts the response together.
“I think the importance of today is that this is a drill for us to find out where we have weak spots, where we have opportunities for improvement, and for us to align with our police, fire and EMS teams to make sure that if there is something that we’re not perfect at that we figure out a way to put a plan in process and make sure that we’re safe should a mass casualty ever happen,” said Benjamin Goodstein, vice president and chief ambulatory officer at Dayton Children’s Hospital.
The response includes making sure the incident command is in control of the hospital, keeping track of the number of children coming in and ensuring teams are aligned under the HICS, according to Goodstein.
The first thing that’s most important, Goodstein said, is to triage the kids to find out which ones are the most severely injuries and to support any kid coming in to the hospital. From triage, they handle the most injured or most affected children down to the least affected child.
Goodstein said he thinks the most important thing he hopes staff can take away from this is the training.
“The more that we do the training, the better we become as an institution, the more involved we are with the community, and better partnerships in the community is always what’s going to make Dayton Children’s a special place,” he said.
The biggest thing Gerstner hopes each agency takes away from the exercise is to be ready, and it’s a chance to try things out to see what works and if there’s gaps to fix.
“These things keep happening. We work all the time on prevention and there are multiple programs to try to prevent it ... It’s on us — police, fire, EMS, hospitals — to be prepared to respond when it happens. So, the big message is to be ready," he said.
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