The Daily Gamecock

USC College of Nursing tests MCI application

The USC College of Nursing hosted a mass casualty practice exercise Tuesday at Williams-Brice Stadium. The exercise was the result of $2.5 million and four years' worth of research. Practice of mass casualty incidents is done to prepare for patients flooding a hospital, which happens during an MCI and can complicate the triage process.

“This is one of the largest mass casualty exercises that has been done in the state. What makes this different is that this is based off of real patients,” said College of Nursing faculty chair Joan Culley.

The event was based off of medical documents pulled from the Graniteville chemical spill of 2005. During the Graniteville incident a train carrying irritant chemicals spilled, causing an MCI.

During this event, 550 people attended in order to learn how to better handle the management of a mass casualty incident. The participants included nursing students, the Columbia Fire Department hazmat team and USC law enforcement, and some community partners were Aiken Regional Hospital, Richland County EMS, SC Department of Health and Environmental Control and other safety professionals from Atlanta.

“We have 400 nursing students who are playing the part of the actual victims of that incident — there are about 150 of those, or 200, and then we also have a control group of patients that were seen at that hospital, but were not victims of the mass casualty chemical incident,” Culley said.

This event was not just for the practice of nursing students, but was also meant to test the ability of a mass casualty computer app developed at USC. This device is meant to speed up the process by which patients are processed and prioritized in the hospital waiting room.

“Our computer engineers doing computer interaction with people here at the university have developed into an app that can go on computers in the emergency room, a cell phone or anything else, and it can integrate with an electronic medical record. So it can really quickly and efficiently triage patients that come into an emergency room. Anybody who's been in an emergency room knows it's chaos on a good day,” Culley said.

The layout of the event included an outdoor practice decontamination for hazmat and volunteer students, and the interior of the stadium was designed to simulate an emergency room waiting room. Students would file in through the door and be directed to a kiosk where they would input “symptoms” given to them on a note card.

“What speaks to me is this study was from the College of Nursing, and I think too often the public don’t think about nurses as scientific researchers, as principle investigators on these large grants that have multi-disciplinary partners within the university and within the community, and that’s my takeaway, is that nurses do some exquisite research,” Culley said.


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