Health officials at NGHS practice reaction to mass casualty event
May 4—Fog hung thick in the air and strobe lights flashed in rapid motion as teams of physician residents and first-year emergency medicine doctors moved through the halls of Northeast Georgia Health System's Center for Simulation and Innovation.
Cries and moans of wounded men and women echoed from audio machines as the teams triaged bodies on the floor — real people dressed up as disaster victims with their faces painted an asphyxiated gray.
The scenes of havoc early Thursday, intended to be as realistic as possible, served as a simulation for mass casualty training for around 80 NGHS faculty members like Dr. Sid Nagrani, who said he and his fellow doctors will be more prepared now in the event an actual manmade or natural disaster were to happen.
"By definition, a mass casualty event is an event that there are more patients than hospital resources can handle, so...it requires a lot more careful thought of what you're going to do with your limited resources, and the stakes are higher, because if there's an explosion...people's lives are at stake and you really don't have much time to think about it," Nagrani said.
The simulated scenario on Thursday was a poultry plant explosion. In 2021, there was a liquid nitrogen leak at Foundation Food Group in Gainesville that killed six people.
"These are first-year emergency medicine doctors that are going to be playing the role of EMS, emergency response and emergency command center, so they can all learn the role of what would actually happen if we had a real event occur...teaching them how to respond in each steps of the way," Simulation Educator Leah Wallace said. "They will be going into that scene, trying to find patients and triage them appropriately to the different hospitals."
Wallace emphasized the need to maintain a high level of preparedness for such situations, particularly mass shootings, pointing to an active-shooter incident that occurred at Northside Hospital in Atlanta the day before.
"Things are going on every day — yesterday we had a shooting in Atlanta...we're just preparing for any mass casualty event in our community," she said.
Dr. Spencer Masiewicz, a physician for emergency medicine residency and Northeast Georgia Medical Center's EMS medical director, had a central role in designing the "blueprint" for Thursday's mass casualty simulation.
Masiewicz said NGHS makes it a priority that a dependable strategy for handling high volumes of wounded casualties is in place in the event of a disaster.
"Not every residency does this, but the fact that we're doing this on this scale is impressive," Masiewicz said. "...we have action plans the hospital sets in place once we hear a disaster has occurred. We have to call in staff, mobilize additional resources, blood products, ventilators, extra equipment from other hospitals...so it's getting them to learn and adjust and do the most good they can with the limited resources available to them.
