As we often say at International Medical Corps, training underpins everything we do. That’s why our Emergency Response Unit (ERU) provides emergency preparedness and response training to healthcare workers around the world, in such countries as Chad, Egypt, Jamaica, Jordan, Lebanon, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria and Ukraine.
“For the ERU, training is not separate from emergency response but is a critical part of it,” says ERU Director Suha Khan. “When healthcare teams have practiced how they will coordinate, make decisions and manage a sudden surge of patients, they are better positioned to act quickly when an emergency occurs. By preparing instructors to take this training back to their own hospitals, we are also creating capacity that can continue to grow.”
Recently, we brought our emergency training home to the United States, offering a course called “Mass Casualty Management [MCM] in Emergency Units” in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. Morgan Broccoli, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a volunteer trainer who has helped facilitate our training in Ukraine and Nigeria, directed the course. A faculty member at our partner Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, Dr. Morgan saw the importance of bringing the training to US hospitals during her deployment to Ukraine. There, she watched as fellow volunteer Dr. Scott Goldberg, another emergency physician from her hospital in Boston, taught the principles of trauma care and MCM to Ukrainian healthcare workers.
“Scott realized that the concepts the MCM course teaches are universally applicable. So when he was redesigning our own mass-casualty plan at Brigham, he used the concepts from the course to design it,” Dr. Morgan says. “What I’ve taken from that experience and his work is that it’s not just important to bring the course to other countries and to teach it internationally—it’s something that we can use in our own hospitals at home, in any resource level.”
Unlike other versions of the course that we’ve taught, the MCM course at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta was hybrid in format—partly delivered online, along with two days of in-person instruction, making it more accessible for both participants and trainers. The goal of the course is to help emergency departments either develop or improve their hospitals’ mass-casualty plans, with a focus on planning and preparation rather than critical skills. The course is ideal for emergency medical personnel, but representatives from surgical and anesthesiology departments, as well as security and hospital leadership, are also encouraged to attend.
Typically, we recruit teams of colleagues to attend these training seminars so that they can work together to develop a mass-casualty plan for their hospital. But during the Atlanta training, we recruited 22 people both from hospitals in the US and from five other countries, with an eye toward expanding our training roster. Some participants were in charge of emergency preparedness at their own hospitals and took the class to gain some more knowledge to utilize at home, while others were in charge of MCM for all of the hospitals in their hospital systems. One attendee works with a hospital for Native Americans on a Navajo reservation and is interested in seeing how the course can be applied at Indian Health Service hospitals.
“Hospitals are often the backbone of an emergency situation, and the systems here in the US—especially rural and underfunded systems—need similar support to international hospitals,” says Head of US and Territories Programs Shira Goldstein, who provided onsite course support during the training in Atlanta.
Following our usual “train the trainer” approach, we also conducted an instructor course in addition to the standard course. Consequently, 21 of the attendees will now be able to teach MCM to others—including ERU Specialist Meaghan Sydlowski, who, as the only non-medical participant on the Atlanta course, was able to present an operational perspective during the training. Over the next six months, the newly trained trainers will be expected to conduct MCM training at their own hospitals, with Dr. Morgan monitoring and supporting these activities. This will enable International Medical Corps to help many more hospitals prepare for the worst.
“Mass casualties can happen in any location at any time,” Dr. Morgan says. “You won’t have the best response possible if you aren’t prepared. Preparation is key, and I truly believe that all hospitals should have mass casualty plans in place for that reason.”