Loyd was one of eighteen Dalton State registered nursing students who participated in a “disaster drill” training session at Hutcheson Medical Center recently. For the drill, her face was transformed by a “moulage,” or makeup mask, to simulate injuries caused by an actual disaster.

“It was really good to be part of a disaster drill because unless you’re one of the casualties, you don’t know all that goes on behind the scenes of a disaster,” says Loyd, who will graduate in May.

“It’s very helpful to see how nurses, EMTs, and other medical personnel act when they’re dealing with multiple casualties and when they’re under so much pressure.”

Twice each year, every hospital must conduct two unannounced disaster drills to see how prepared the hospitals are to handle mass casualties, says Billie Precise, Assistant Professor of Nursing at Dalton State.

This was the first time Dalton State students were invited to participate in a drill at Hutcheson Medical Center, located in Fort Oglethorpe. Sophomores in one of Precise’s nursing classes, who are doing their fall clinical rotations at Hutcheson, joined students from Northwest Technical College to make up the 30 victims of the disaster.

Dalton State and Northwest Technical’s registered nursing students had
a chance to be victims and patients during the recent disaster drill.

The disaster scenario is different each time, says Precise, noting that while hospital personnel expect to participate in two disaster drills each year, they don’t know what “type” of disaster they’ll be facing or when it will occur until the very last minute. This “disaster” was a construction scene accident which left dozens injured and several “dead.”

Students’ bodies, some “bloodied” with moulage, some “bent” with broken bones, were spread on a grassy field near the hospital, where EMS workers initially “found” them.

“Our students were the actual patients who were triaged by Emergency Medical Services personnel,” says Precise. “They were able to see how EMS makes decisions on who should be treated first, and they were able to see how it feels to be transported on backboards to area hospitals to the surgery, radiology, or outpatient units, or to area morgues.”

Sophomore Roxy Gazaway joined fellow student Jennifer Harvey as two of the deceased victims.

Sophomores Roxy Gazaway and Jennifer Harvey were “fatally injured”
during the construction accident drill at Hutcheson Medical Center.

“I thought it was a good experience because I didn’t know what to expect,” Gazaway says.

And Lynn Acuff agrees. “It’s a good learning experience to see things from the other side,” she says. “We need a great deal of understanding and involvement in other aspects of nursing care so we can be better nurses.”