KCU-Joplin holds mass casualty training event

There was a mass casualty exercise in Joplin Saturday morning.

“Victims” were found in a wooded area south of the KCU-Joplin Medical School.

They first were brought up from a ravine and then underwent  assessment by student doctors. A portion of the medical school was transformed into a fictitious hospital.

Robert Arnce, M.D., an Emergency Medicine physician and full-time faculty member at KCU-Joplin, directed the event.

“In a mass casualty event, we first triage the injured in the field,” Dr. Arnce explained.

“Folks that have little or no chance of survival would be designated as not coming to the E.R.

“The sickest people that have the best chance of survival are taken care of first. The walking wounded or minimally injured would be taken care of after that.”

Dr. Arnce said people with little or no chance of survival would be kept comfortable but would not immediately be transferred for treatment.

He said mass casualty training has an interesting history.

It emerged from the Advance Trauma Life Support  (ATLS) system that was first developed after an orthopedic surgeon and his family were involved in a plane crash that resulted in bad outcomes simply because of a lack of organization.

It all began when Dr. Jim Styner crashed his airplane into a  rural Nebraska cornfield in February 1976.

Dr. Styner was seriously injured. His wife was killed instantly.  Three of his children had critical injuries. One child only had minor injuries.

The care that he and his family subsequently received was inadequate by today’s standards.

The surgeon, recognizing how inadequate their treatment was, stated:  “When I can provide better care in the field with limited resources than what my children and I received at the primary care facility, there is something wrong with the system, and the system has to be changed.”

That program helped lead to Advanced Trauma Life Suppoprt introduced by the American College of Surgeons in 1980.

It caught on fast. Within a few years,  ATLS courses became available in more than 80 countries, training over 1 million doctors in the first 25 years alone.

Similar techniques were also developed by the military.

“Basically, we color code folks,” Dr. Arnce said. “A ‘black’ in the field is somebody who is not going to survive, no matter what we do.  A ‘red’ is somebody who has to be seen right away.”

Dr. Arnce said physicians choosing to go into Emergency Medicine and  trauma treatment get more training in ATLS  than those in some other medical specialties that require less direct emergency evaluation and treatment.

First-year students at KCU played the role of disaster victims during the exercise. Second-year students played the roles of EMTs who triaging patients and physicians delivering care.

After triage, the mock patients were brought into a fictitious Emergency Room for evaluation and treatment recommendations.

“It’s really about looking at your resources,” Dr. Arnce stated. “What can I handle? What can I not handle?

“It’s trying to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people.”

Classes began at the KCU-Joplin campus in Joplin in 2017.