Israeli Mass Casualty - Terror Workshop: Training Day 5
By Greg Friese, MS, NREMT-P, WEMT, Emergency Preparedness Systems, LLC
EMSResponder.com Contributor
In this fifth report from Israel, Greg Friese reflects on the group’s visits to three prominent medical centers.
Greg first discusses the largest hospital in Israel, with beds for more than two thousand patients and a state-of-the-art center for medical simulation. He describes the center’s manikins, control booths, one-way mirrors for student evaluation, and real human actors. He explains that all graduating medical students must practice there, and that all paramedics must go there for licensure testing. In addition, medical providers use it to practice for upcoming cases or to recreate rare cases. Greg will be writing more on this simulation center in an upcoming issue of EMS Magazine.
Greg also discusses a 500-bed hospital just north of the Gaza Strip which is within range of regular missile fire, and where the staff has had to learn preparedness through trial and error. Greg also shares their chilling experience with a burn patient who was successfully treated, and later caught on video in a suicide bombing attempt. Greg discusses the things the hospital has done to be more secure, and their permanent state of preparedness for mass casualty incidents.
Finally, Greg shares his experience at a 450-bed Level One trauma center in Jerusalem, where the group received a presentation on MCI events and research, and discussed how terror trauma is a unique type of trauma. Providers there handle six to seven such events per year. The group’s presenter there was Professor Shmuel C. Shapira M.D. M.P.H., who is Chairman and CEO of the International Center of Terror Medicine, at http://www.terrormedicine.org.
