SPOKANE, Wash. – Washington State University pharmacy students and faculty will participate in a disaster training exercise 9 a.m.-noon Wednesday, April 18, with firefighters, paramedics and search and rescue personnel at the Fire Training Center, 3808 E. Nora Ave., Spokane.
The Spokane city and valley fire departments, Fire Districts 3, 8 and 9, Coeur d’Alene Fire Department, Kootenai County Fire District, Spokane Metropolitan Medical Response System, and urban search and rescue teams will participate. Referred to as “Rumble in the Rubble,” the exercise will simulate a hospital wing collapse due to heavy snow on the roof with multiple injuries.
Pharmacy students will act as trauma victims or other bystanders, according to Brenda Bray and Colleen Terriff, clinical associate professors of pharmacy at the WSU Health Sciences campus in Spokane. Bray and Terriff teach emergency preparedness and response to third-year pharmacy students and emphasize the importance for pharmacists to be involved in community-wide disaster planning and exercise efforts.
The mass casualty exercise will give students an opportunity to see the region’s first-responder agencies in a coordinated response and will allow the college to test its emergency notification system.
Terriff is assigning injuries and severities to the volunteers.
In addition to the collapsed building exercise, Bray and Megan Willson, a clinical assistant professor of pharmacy, will run a blast injury simulation scenario with a 3-G human patient simulator a sophisticated high-tech manikin. Teams of paramedics and emergency medical personnel will be asked to triage and treat “Sim-Man,” who will be suffering from a variety of blast injuries.
Kevin McCollum and Dale Treichel from the Spokane Fire Department will evaluate how the teams perform and recognize the minor and life-threatening injuries. Bray said the exercise will provide the opportunity to collaborate with local agencies to integrate use of high fidelity simulation manikins into disaster training drills.
Since 2007, Bray and Terriff have led a faculty-student team in the WSU College of Pharmacy that, through a written memorandum of understanding, provides emergency assistance to the Spokane Regional Health District if services are needed for public emergencies in the eastern Washington counties served by the health district. Teaching with simulation at the WSU College of Pharmacy has been spearheaded by Willson and Bray and has been incorporated into the doctor of pharmacy (Pharm.D.) curriculum since 2006.