MHH students train for disaster situations

A new elective course in emergency and disaster medicine trains medical students for large-scale emergencies and promotes collaboration with other emergency response teams.

An eye-catcher against the blue sky above Hannover Medical School (MHH): The German Armed Forces' NH-90 MedEvac multi-purpose helicopter landed on campus in March. The reason was the new one-week elective course "Introduction to Emergency and Disaster Medicine" offered by the Clinical Department of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine for medical students starting in their third year. The elective course is taught in cooperation with the MHH teaching hospital, the Bundeswehr Hospital Westerstede. MHH President Prof. Dr. Denise Hilfiker-Kleiner supports this close collaboration in teaching with other emergency response forces such as the Bundeswehr: "It is a good opportunity for our students to prepare for a potential deployment in the event of a disaster and to gain insight into civil-military cooperation. Additional modules on disaster medicine as well as trauma processing from the Clinical Departments of Trauma Surgery and Psychosomatics are in the planning stages."

Medical school prepares future physicians to provide optimal care for individual patients. In addition, through modules in Emergency Medicine, MHH students learn to initiate necessary life-saving measures and make diagnoses under time pressure. However, what a large-scale operation involving multiple critically injured patients entails and what role they play in a so-called mass casualty incident (MCI) is not typically part of their training. To change this, the Anesthesiology team added Emergency and Disaster Medicine as an elective course to the curriculum and, for the first time, trained 15 medical students and trainees as medical assistants to think in terms of resource scarcity and mass casualty scenarios.

Disaster medicine as a new focus in the curriculum

In seminars with disaster response teams such as the German Armed Forces, the police, the fire department, and emergency medical services, the students spent a week learning about various disaster scenarios and practicing how to collaborate with other emergency responders in the event of a disaster. This included the use of virtual reality goggles with simulated emergency patients as well as simulation exercises for creating an operational plan using the tactical signs and symbols generally applicable to civil protection.

Simulations and tabletop exercises prepared the aspiring physicians for exceptionally stressful situations and built their resilience to stress. To this end, they trained to decide, under extreme time pressure and following the standardized triage algorithm PRIOR, who requires immediate assistance and who must wait-a core competency that is also invaluable in the daily routine of a hospital's Central Emergency Room. The 11-ton Bundeswehr helicopter was deployed during a practical exercise involving the unloading of patients. The NH-90 can transport up to seven seriously injured patients in a lying position and provide them with intensive medical care.

Exchange with other emergency services

"The need and demand for such a course offering has recently increased due to the overall political situation. But large-scale operations like those in the Ahr Valley or the Eschede train crash are also realistic scenarios for which we must prepare our medical students. That is why we decided a year ago to offer this new elective course," explains PD Dr. Hendrik Eismann, senior physician in the Department of Emergency Medicine within Anesthesiology. His colleague Dr. Jan Carlo Del Terdesco took over as the lecturer, assuming the task of developing and implementing a curriculum: "It was important to us that students have ample opportunity to interact with other emergency responders and rehearse emergency scenarios together with them. Our goal was to sharpen their awareness and understanding of both their own roles and those of others." The curriculum offerings in disaster medicine are set to be further expanded in the future in collaboration with the MHH Clinical Department of Trauma Surgery and other specialized departments.

Text: Bettina Dunker