Health First Emergency and Trauma Teams Drill With EMS First Responders for ‘Worst-Case’ Scenario

Trauma HAL served as the primary accident victim/trauma patient

BREVARD COUNTY • MELBOURNE, FLORIDA – The initial call that echoed over radios at approximately 9:10 a.m. on Friday, April 7, apprised of a building fire with possible injuries. But as first responders arrived on the scene, they would find much more.

Luckily, this disastrous and chaotic scene unfolding was only a practice event simulating a true-to-life emergency, including overturned vehicles, multiple medical-attention scenarios and accident victims.

The Emergency Medical Services mock drill was a collaboration between Health First Trauma and Emergency Department teams and local EMS teams – including the Melbourne Fire Department and the Satellite Beach Fire Department – conducting a full-scale training exercise at the City of Melbourne Fire Training Center on Hughes Road.

The drill provided a multi-situation scenario beginning with a car crash and building fire, first responders arriving on site, extricating and stabilizing a patient, triaging, and finally, transporting the trauma patients via air or vehicle to be treated at the hospital.

“This is a very important drill for our team at Health First, as well as the EMS teams we have assembled here today. We are able to see firsthand how care is rendered in the field directly to the patient, which gives us a better understanding for how they will arrive to us at the hospital,” said Dr. Mark Pessa, Health First Trauma Medical Director.

“Many of our traumas are MVCs (motor vehicle collisions), as we practiced today. Trauma care has improved tremendously over the past 20 years in terms of how patients are cared for from the scene to the hospital. We are the county’s only trauma center [Level II].

“And Brevard County is a very large county, so we have to work with many different agencies and understand how they work and how they will transport a patient to us. These sorts of exercises help us better understand how each EMS unit responds, provides care, communicates and prepares to transport patient to the hospital where our team will then be prepared with the information already at hand when that patient arrives,” said Pessa.

Now in his second year, Trauma HAL served as the primary accident victim/trauma patient. Purchased in 2022 with a grant from the Health First Foundation, Trauma HAL is a lifelike mannequin specifically engineered to meet the training needs of first responders, EMS, and in-hospital emergency teams.

Trauma HAL helps teams engage in true-to-life training exercises to improve emergency preparedness, response, and patient care. It is a technologically advanced patient simulator that has true-to-life anatomy and physiology and can simulate everything from strokes to gunshot wounds.

A tablet-based system allows different scenarios to be programmed and controlled on the scene and provides event recording and can export performance reports for debriefing.

In addition, EMS and trauma care clinicians are able to review protocols and provide performance feedback to participants at the conclusion of the re-enactment geared toward the continual improvement of emergency response, pre-hospital intervention and trauma care in Brevard County.

“This is as real world as it gets, while keeping it safe,” said Phil Lietz, Division Chief of EMS for the Melbourne Fire Department.

“We want to have a good relationship, to understand what the ER team needs and what the trauma teams might need from us and vice versa – what they’d like to see us do for that patient. We try to do this every year or two to keep up with the times and technology, while maintaining a good relationship with the medical center and teams. We train often, but this level of training exercise today just takes it all to another level.”

To keep up with the latest news at Health First, visit HF.org/news.

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