Waynesburg University held a Mock Emergency Training Session Tuesday, Nov. 7, in the Paul R. Stewart Science Hall to provide an experiential learning opportunity for senior nursing students. The training session, held between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m., was for students in the Clinical Prevention and Population Health course (NUR 419) to prepare them for an emergency situation in a hospital setting.

The original idea for the Mock Emergency Training Session was from Dr. Kathy Stolfer, associate professor of Nursing. Stolfer came up with the idea in August after learning from a medical resource about the importance of training health care workers in this manner.

“One of the things that has been documented throughout the literature is that health care professionals are very much at risk for being harmed or killed,” Stolfer said. “Particularly, [emergency rooms] are big areas where incidents do happen…unfortunately we have to prepare for the new norm because this can happen anywhere.”

The critical incident scenario was set up in the Simulation Lab to replicate an emergency room setting. It combined both an active shooter and a workplace-violence incident. Stolfer worked alongside Eve Weaver, Simulation Lab coordinator, who agreed on the importance of the event.

“We need to prepare them for what could happen, what’s going to happen or what they might see,” Weaver said. “We think about these incidents as all happening at a church or happening at a concert, but we never stop and think about what’s happening in a healthcare setting.”

Another layer of the event was the collaborative effort between the Nursing Department, Criminal Justice Department, Department of Communication, local police and University Relations.

James Tanda, director of Security Operations and Emergency Management, was a lead facilitator in representing the Criminal Justice Department. Stolfer reached out to Tanda when she first came up with the idea and began to conceptualize the entire operation.

“This event was about educating senior nursing students who experience, unfortunately, violence and things like this on the job, and we wanted to bring this practical experience to them,” said Tanda. “We also wanted our criminal justice students to participate for them to collaborate.”

To get criminal justice students involved, Tanda chose five students from the department to simulate victims for the nursing students, while also giving them a chance to observe law enforcement officials in action.

“The students get a chance to work in a high-stress environment where real police are responding, and simulated victims are shot, including themselves, and they get a chance to get a different perspective,” Tanda said.

After planning for the event had commenced, Stolfer and Tanda quickly involved Stacey Brodak, vice president for Institutional Advancement and University Relations. Upon hearing about it, she immediately started thinking big-picture.

“We wanted to make sure that students, faculty and even the surrounding community would not be concerned if they saw the police cars showing up on campus,” Brodak said.

As a precaution, students were alerted via e-mail and the university alert system, e2campus, that the Mock Emergency Training Exercise would be taking place. For Brodak, there were two components of the event: “You had the internal piece that was the people involved in the simulation, and then there was the communication externally just so everybody knew it was a drill,” she said.

It was also Brodak’s idea to invite Department of Communication students to benefit from the mock press conference after the simulation and debriefing sessions were over. However, despite the participation from the other departments, the day, according to Tanda, was for the nursing students and their preparation for potentially violent situations.

“No campus, no hospital [and] no workplace is immune from this or safe from [violence],” said Tanda. “Although we practice and pray for the best, we prepare for the worst. We are doing our part to make sure we are ready in case anything like this were to happen, but in light of Las Vegas, the Baptist church in Texas and other attacks this past year, there is no better time to prepare than now.”

 

Editor’s Note: Teghan Simonton and Luke Goodling contributed to this report.