“There’s definitely an element of having a shock factor,” Medical student Henry Singer said. “I think it was definitely trial by fire.”
HEMPSTEAD, NY — Medical students at Hofstra University’s Zucker School of Medicine were given a dramatic look at how to deal with mass casualties. During last weekend’s event, students were placed in simulated scenarios, including a terrorist bomb explosion on a bus and a train derailment.
“It was really the first opportunity we had to apply what we learned in our EMT curriculum,” Medical student Henry Singer told Patch. “It was the most intense iteration of how we could potentially do it.”
The students were left to make immediate decisions amid the “planned” emergencies at the Nassau Fire Service Academy.
“There’s definitely an element of having a shock factor,” Singer said. “I think it was definitely trial by fire.”
It gave the Zucker students a unique learning experience. They are one of the first schools in the country to incorporate EMT training into its rigorous curriculum.
Having police participate helped bring an element of realism to the event and “getting your heart rate raised,” he said. “You develop an appreciation for how much more intense it would be in the real scenario.”
Singer, 26, from Chicago, said his main takeaway from the exercise was the amount of preparation schools and the police have taken for everyone’s safety.
“There’s significant investment to prepare for situations of varying degrees of likelihood. They’re not messing around in that regard,” Singer said.
The emergency scenarios were discussed ahead in the classroom. Students would take turns in groups as first responders and victims.
“They would put makeup on us and designate varying degrees of injury,” he said. “You’d go through the scenario as we’d been taught and then there’d be a debriefing at the end with the faculty and the police officers.”
At the conclusion of medical school, Singer and his classmates will apply for hospital residencies. He is thinking about specializing in “something surgical.”
However, Singer recognizes that he’s a bit older after working in business.
“We’ll see how it plays out,” he said.
