Using Human Patient Simulation for Disaster Medical Training

There are several challenges to disaster medical response training and include the use of limited or non-standard equipment and supplies, working under altered standards of care, expanded scope of practices, altered triage decision tree, surge capacity, failure of communications and a variety of other issues that impact mass casualty care.  Add to the scenario the the integration of NIMS, and the incident command system and you will see how decisions made far away from your location can impact your patient care and outcome.

Human patient simulation has been a valuable tool for training medical teams on how to deal with mass casualty events.  But there is still much work to be done. Access to simulators with operators familiar with mass casualty response along with decreases in training dollars prevent human patient simulation from reaching its full potential in mass casualty training. How do we increase access to this valuable tool?  What is the perceived value to this type of training? Can the US afford this type of training under the current economic climate?  Is current training adequate for a medical mass casualty response?