Health First Partners With Multiple Brevard County Agencies on Live Trauma Drill
By Space Coast Daily // April 28, 2026
Biannual mock emergency training exercise, featured life-like patient simulator and mass casualty incident involving a school bus
BREVARD COUNTY • TITUSVILLE, FLORIDA – The message is the same each time Health First conducts its biannual mass casualty response drill across Brevard County: When lives are on the line, time, communication, teamwork, practice, and planning matter.
Flanked by dozens of first responders with the Titusville Fire Department, Coastal Ambulance, Health First medical training staff, and many more observers, today’s mass casualty drill within the confines of Chain of Lakes Park in Titusville was expertly designed to simulate a live traumatic emergency event involving a school bus and vehicle, multiple medical attention scenarios, accident trauma “victims,” and the arrival and utilization of a First Flight medical helicopter.
Staged overturned vehicles and a school bus supplied by Brevard Public Schools were included in the event, as well as student actors from Eastern Florida State College to create lifelike training scenarios.
Participating organizations included:
• The Titusville Fire Department
• City of Titusville
• Coastal Ambulance
• Health First – First Flight
• Brevard County Public Schools
• Eastern Florida State College
“While it’s so important that the crews on scene are getting practice through these hands-on, life-saving emergent skills, I think at the end of the day, we can all reflect and say that what’s most important is being able to collaborate, to go in with critical incident management, to be able to critically think on how to prioritize, optimize, designate, and lead in these really chaotic situations. There really is no other training opportunity that comes close to having something set up like this,” said Dr. Larissa Dudley, EMS medical director for First Flight and multiple Brevard municipalities, and emergency department medical director for Holmes Regional Medical Center – the region’s only Level II trauma center.
“Through training scenarios like this, we look for and support each medical director at each fire department training their crews, their EMTs, and their paramedics on this critical life-saving skills, these EMTs, and paramedics – and they rely on their medical director’s protocols. But when we come out for an incident like this, you have to critically think through each patient scenario,” said Dr. Dudley.
“You have to individualize care and make sure that you have an understanding of these protocols – combined with critical thinking – to be able to come up with the best patient outcomes.
Not only doing these hands-on skills here today in real time but then making decisions about which patients have to go to a local hospital vs. what patients go to a trauma center, or which patients need to go to a pediatric trauma center. So, it’s not just the skills that they’re performing, it’s those critical thinking moments that are really valuable in training episodes like this,” Dudley continued.
The training exercise also included use of Health First’s “Trauma HAL” simulated patient.
Purchased with a grant from the Health First Foundation, “Trauma HAL” is 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 will 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.
