Simulated trauma day creates realism and drama for health-care students

Second-year Faculty of Nursing student Jonas Vaskas arrived to class on June 26 at the University of Calgary Foothills campus expecting to work with medical students from the Cumming School of Medicine on “some kind of simulation.

“We met our team of about four in a lecture hall and then the door at the back of the lecture theatre opened and a large man dressed in blue with gloves on and a stretcher behind him gave us the situation,” explains Vaskas. "'There has been a vehicular motor collision just outside the medical school, we’re doing overflow from the ER here, we need to you to assess the patients before triage can get here, let's go!’ We all went to assigned rooms where patients were waiting.”

And so began the inaugural interprofessional trauma day — a simulated mass casualty incident organized by a team of instructors from the University of Calgary, SAIT and Mount Royal University (MRU) to expose students to the type of health-care team they will work with in their career. The scenario included medical students from the Cumming School as well as nursing and social work students from the University of Calgary. Nursing students from the MRU program and respiratory therapy and paramedic programs from SAIT also participated.

“It was a dramatic start that morning that definitely threw me off the first simulation,” explains Hannah Brown, another University of Calgary nursing student. “I expected to be in a situation where we would all have to work together and communicate and that’s exactly what happened.”

Read the whole UToday story in the July 17 edition here.