CSU Bathurst paramedicine students take part in simulation exercise

The third-year students take part in a simulation exercise each year in which they test their skills before those skills get taken out into the real world.

This year the scenario was a multi-casualty traffic collision.

"When you have a large volume of patients that outweighs the resources available, that's a multi-casualty incident, where we have to use triage, which is different to normal assessment of patients," paramedicine lecturer Georgina Pickering said.

"You prioritise patients quickly and get them to the appropriate resources."

Students have learnt multi-casualty management in other subjects, Ms Pickering said.

"And because this is the final subject, we use a lot of the learning over the last three years and we try to develop it.

"We've done some basic revision of how it's done and now they've got to put it into practice. So there is quite a lot of pressure for them to pull the memories."

Ellie Gaffney was one of the third-year students waiting expectantly for the simulation to begin.

"We don't really know what we're going into, which is what it's going to be like in real life if you ever go to a mass casualty incident," she said.

"All we know is we've all been given certain roles: we've got patients, I'm a subsequent crew, we've got first-on-scene crew, then you've got your management roles, forward commander, casualty clearing officer, safety officer, that sort of thing."

Ms Gaffney said the students had been given a mass casualty scenario in their first year, so it will be "really beneficial to see how far we've come" since then.

"We've got a whole lot of skills that we've developed since then. Lots of us have been in placement," she said.

"In the real world, day to day, you only really have one, maybe two patients at a time.

"In this case, we're going to have more patients than paramedics, so it will be really good to put together all our skills, both clinical and non-clinical - our communication, our teamwork."

The first-year scenario, a nightclub bombing, was staged inside the university's Simulation Centre and included plenty of details to make it realistic.

"They had lights, smoke machines, music blaring, as if you were really in a nightclub, sirens going, everyone yelling, patients screaming," Ms Gaffney said.

Last Friday's traffic collision scenario was staged in an open area near the Simulation Centre and included a number of vehicles and students portraying victims suffering injuries of varying degrees.

Third-year students, as emergency services, assessed and treated patients, comforted them, put them on stretchers and even removed the doors on a vehicle in order to get to those inside.

Ms Gaffney, who grew up in Sydney, said she came to Bathurst specifically to do the CSU paramedicine degree.

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