Israel medics, hospital simulate terror scenario in surprise drill
The beach exercise was for the purpose of training first responders and medical staff from all organizations involved in how to respond to a terror attack resulting in mass casualties.
By JERUSALEM POST STAFFIsrael medics, hospital simulate terror scenario in surprise drill(photo credit: UNITED HATZALAH)United Hatzalah and the Galilee Medical Center, along with security forces and the Nahariya Municipality held a surprise joint training session on the beach on Tuesday.The beach exercise was for the purpose of training first responders and medical staff from all organizations involved in how to respond to a terror attack resulting in mass casualties.For the exercise, 30 people simulated being injured along the beach. Their imagined injuries ranged anywhere from stab wounds, to gunshot wounds, to missing limbs, burns, contusions, abrasions, severe trauma and so on.The entirety of the medical force were unaware the drill was to take place when it did, if at all.The "injured" were medevaced via ambulance to the Galilee Medical Center, where the nearly 100 medical staff cared for wounded and injured as though they were true injuries.“The training drill was successful and incredibly helpful in providing our volunteers with a chance to hone their skills in treating severe trauma victims, which is thankfully not something that we do every day,” said Nahariya Chapter Head of United Hatzalah Menachem Goldberg. “Following the drill, we will be holding a debrief this week in order to review what transpired in-depth and continually improve upon our medical response time and quality of care."I think every volunteer who participated in the drill last night learned a lot," Goldberg added. "Thanks to training exercises such as this, should a situation like this take place in real life, God forbid, we are now more prepared on an individual as well as a cross-organizational level to provide better and faster care.”“These training drills are incredibly important in giving our volunteers first-hand experience in working in partnership with other forces that respond to mass casualty incidents," said President and Founder of United Hatzalah Eli Beer. "These situations are not ones that occur every day thank God. There are plenty of volunteers who have never experienced the chaos of such a scenario."While that is a good thing, we need to prepare ourselves, and our volunteers with the ability to know what to do if they should find themselves in such a scenario, working as a first responder on a single person is one thing, working together with dozens of other first responders, from the police, the military, the regional hospital, and other organizations is completely different, the more joint exercises like this that we do, the better the cross-organizational cooperation will be during a real-life incident and that will result in the patients receiving better care faster.”
