By ROD ZOOK
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Hutchinson Regional Medical Center, Reno County EMS, County Emergency Management, and the Hutchinson Fire Department conducted a mass casualty drill Tuesday and will continue that drill Wednesday.
“We went with an earthquake event because we have been experiencing earthquakes lately,” HRMC Security Emergency Manager Chris Cooper said. “In Kansas, receiving an earthquake that would do this type of damage we’re simulating is probably slim, but it gives us the mass casualty component that we’re looking for.”
The agencies were joined by the Hutchinson Police Department, Hutchinson Public Works, Evergy, Kansas Gas Service, and the Reno County Emergency Communications Center. A large focus was on the hospital itself and its operations in such an event.
“We are testing our mass casualty, patient surge, our fatality management . . . and then our patient tracking throughout the hospital,” Cooper said. “We are utilizing many units of the hospital including ER, surgery, radiology and ICU. We’re moving patients throughout the hospital.”
Hutchinson Regional Medical Center campus and the Annex, formerly known as Dillon Living Center, were the main location for the drill that provided a mass casualty event with an unknown number of victims in unknown locations for first responders and fire crews to assess. From there, they were triaged and then removed from the building where they were placed in different levels of triage centers in front of the building. There, they were treated by EMS before being transported as part of the exercise. Cooper says it took a long time to plan the exercise. Cooper talked about the effort that went into the exercise and the part outside agencies played in putting the plan together.
“Fire and EMS really revamped their mass casualty incident protocol,” Cooper said. “They’ve been testing, they’ve been training on them. For the last six months, they’ve been going all out to make this plan, and today is just the end of all the planning and all of the stages that they’ve done.”
Wednesday’s exercise will be held at the Hutch Fire Department's Command and Training Center, 3201 E. 4th Ave., where the agencies will go through a briefing on how the exercise went and evaluate what occurred.
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