An interagency response to a road crash rescue incident was the focus of an emergency services training exercise at Werribee on Thursday, April 19.
Personnel from Ambulance Victoria (AV), Country Fire Authority (CFA), and Victoria Police braved the cold and rainy night-time conditions to practice their on-scene skills by undertaking two simulation exercises.
AV Wyndham senior team manager Blixa Webster said the learning opportunity was designed to mimic real-life scenarios that first responders may face and to stimulate their stress response, just as a real incident would, but in a controlled environment.
“These scenarios are very stressful – you have multiple people injured and trapped that require treatment, its confronting even when simulated, and you’re working in messy, confined conditions that is a mangled car,” Mr Webster said.
“We want to elicit a stress response from the paramedics and firefighters responding, because that’s what they are going to face on the road. We do these exercises in real-time, in low light, and make the exercise as close to the real thing as possible.”
Both scenarios imitated a car that had been involved in a collision and flipped onto its side, with multiple patients injured and requiring extraction and emergency treatment for time-critical patterns of injury.
Paramedics practiced assessing and managing patients in the realistic mass casualty scenario, building their capability to better respond to scenarios they may face on the road.
Mr Webster said the training provided valuable information for all agencies involved.
“We each have our competing priorities at an incident, so exercises like this help us to understand where the friction points are and what we can do to alleviate those,” Mr Webster said.
“This training is a great opportunity for paramedics, firefighters, and police officers to practice their response to these high-stress, high-risk scenarios.”
