Press Release
Wisconsin EMS staff train for active shooters, IEDs
Improvised explosive device training for emergency responders
For the first time this year, the Wisconsin EMS Association's annual conference offered training on how to respond to a mass casualty event involving an improvised explosive device while it is still active and unfolding.
"The teams moved quickly, but carefully as their eyes scanned for possible explosives in darkened corridors.
Groups of firefighters, paramedics, emergency medical technicians and police officers shouted instructions and warnings to one another above the din of gunfire and the screams of the wounded in the blast zone.
Once the first team, known as a rescue task force, swept through — dodging suitcases, lunch boxes and other possibly hazardous objects scattered in an apparent explosion — and assessed the situation, other teams came in to evacuate the injured. They carried the wounded to a safe area to be treated for their injuries.
The chaotic scene was a drill, part of a daylong training about how to respond to an improvised explosive device blast, offered at the Wisconsin EMS Association's annual conference. The conference..."
Ridge woman re-creates wounds to train first responders
Paradise >> Bobbie Merica doesn’t call herself an artist. Despite owning hundreds of brushes and other tools that she uses to re-create injuries sustained by humans and animals, she considers herself a business woman in the very young category of moulage.
The company she founded, Moulage Concepts, is the national leader in the business of re-creating traumatic injuries for emergency response training.
Merica operates out of her home office in Paradise to travel around the country to hospitals, fire stations and military bases where she holds “train the trainer” workshops.
“I ask them ‘what’s your worst case scenario’,” Merica explains, “because everyone has one and knows what theirs is.”
OSU clinical instructor crafts simulated injuries, giving nursing students a more realistic look at trauma
Shauntae Yankasky sat on the floor, blood dripping from her right arm where two bones protruded from a horrific-looking wound.
With smoke filling the lobby of Newton Hall at Ohio State University, 14 other victims of a bus crash lay strewn with various injuries.
The scene wasn’t as serious as it seemed, though: It was staged this week as part of a “ mass-casualty” simulation designed to test the skills of students in the OSU School of Nursing.
About 70 seniors in the Nursing 501 course rotated among the victims to perform triage, with each group of five or so students spending 30 seconds assessing the seriousness of the injuries.
Merica’s “Medical Moulage” is THE Moulage Book
Bobbie Merica is a leading expert in the field of healthcare simulation moulage. As an accomplished simulation author, workshop educator and lab coordinator Bobbie is the definition of “simulation champion”. But now her latest work Medical Moulage: How to Make Your Simulations Come Alive has set the bar to a whole new level!
Imagine over 630 pages of moulage recipes ranging from stings to prolapsed cords with detailed instructions for ingredients, equipment, application techniques and even cleanup! Each recipe has several large and clear photos (over 1200 full-color in the book) which help demonstrate the steps involved and what the finished product should look like.
The clean layout and simple instructions make moulage recipes easy to understand and quick to follow. Not only does Bobbie cover the techniques necessary to craft the specific recipe in question but also helps us “set the stage” with other moulage tips that can help further ‘bridge the gap’ to simulator realism.
Moulage Concepts Featured in CBRNE Newsletter Issue 50, 2013
How good are you at pretending, at engaging and play acting? If you were instructed to care for a simulated victim with a patient profile card that read "hemorrhaging gunshot wound" or "open pneumothorax" could you see in your mind? Would your pulse instinctively quicken at the thought of congealed blood pooling around the victim or bloody froth at the chest wound entry point, bubbling with each exhalation? Working instinctively, would you begin putting pressure on imaginary wounds and shouting out orders, adrenaline building, propelling you into what you have been trained to do-save a life. If you had never experienced these two medical emergencies and I asked you to pretend in your scenario that your victim had them, could you do it?
Making Up Disaster BY TIMOTHY GOWER / PROTOMAG.COM
When Bobbie Merica worked in nursing schools setting up medical simulators—sophisticated computerized mannequins that can bleed, vomit and even talk back when asked questions—the students complained to Merica that something was missing. “They were dissuaded by the technology,” she says. “They said it didn’t feel real.”
Merica began studying wounds, burns and other physical signs of trauma and disease in medical texts and figuring out how to re-create them using theatrical makeup and other materials. Today, Merica is an expert in moulage; French for impression or cast, the term originally referred to wax models of the human body used by medical students to learn anatomy, and is now enjoying a renaissance in the form of makeup and prosthetics applied to mannequins and humans as teaching aids.
With her Moulage Concepts business in Paradise, Calif., Merica teaches educators how to make their simulators look more realistically injured or sick. She also teaches emergency-preparedness coordinators how to apply moulage and is frequently hired to make up volunteer victims at mock disasters.
‘Bridging the Gap’ in simulated training exercises
How good are you at pretending, at engaging and play-acting?If you were instructed to care for a simulated victim with a patient profile card that read “hemorrhaging gunshot wound” or “open pneumothorax” could you see it in your mind? Would your pulse instinctively quicken at the thought of congealed blood pooling around the victim or bloody froth at the chest wound entry point, bubbling with each exhalation? Working instinctively, would you begin putting pressure on imaginary wounds and shouting out orders, adrenaline building, propelling you into what you have been trained to do — save a life? If you had never experienced these two medical emergencies and I asked you to pretend in your scenario that your victim had them, could you do it?