ADF exercise at Latchford Barracks (Wodonga, Vic)

The Border Mail

ADF nurses confront explosive scenario in high-fidelity training at Latchford Barracks

Transcript

00:01It has been chaotic, nothing short of so much has been happening. It's really

00:08highlighted how important communication is in what we do. Chaos, pure chaos. There

00:13was an explosion, people everywhere, lots of blast injuries, penetrating injuries,

00:18burns, head injuries, things like that. Pure chaos, so with limited resources at

00:25hand and so many patients to triage we had people with head injuries wandering

00:28off into the bush. We had media trying to get in. There was someone with a rifle at

00:33one point. I think they weren't one of us but it was interesting. It was a little

00:38bit overwhelming at times. I just kept trying to tell myself it's learning

00:41outcomes from this. But it was stressful. You have a baseline understanding of

00:47what you're meant to do but then applying it at full speed is quite

00:54challenging and as opposed to a tabletop exercise when everyone's there you've

00:58got actual teams in different locations that you can't access. Radio chatter, you've

01:03got people that need to send through casualty reports and other people trying

01:07to communicate other things so yeah it's very overwhelming. We actually got the

01:12firefighters in to help clear the scene and they came out and reported it safe.

01:16When these things happen for real we do need to work together. We had the emergency

01:21services come in just the other day and explain their roles in these kinds of

01:25incidents and how we can help them and how they can help us. So I enlisted in 2009

01:29as a clerk at the time. I've had some amazing experiences and amazing postings

01:36within that. I got to be an instructor for a while. I got to do some out of

01:40mustering stuff but I deployed in 2011 as a med clerk and decided that I wanted to be

01:47on the other team and here I am. This morning we have a mass cast exercise and

01:52this part of my ADF, extended practice nursing course. It's the old catering

01:59building so we set up a scenario in there for today. It was an explosion and we have

02:04lots of casualties in there and we have our students set up into groups and into

02:09roles and position. Within the Australian military we do work quite closely with

02:14our public services and the goal of this exercise is for the new nurses in ADF to

02:21understand that it's not just us, it's a group effort and it's good to have

02:27civilian coming in as well because that is their bread and butter and they can show

02:32us how to run this better. In a domestic emergency if asked the ADF will come in

02:37to support the civilian emergency services. However in this scenario it's set on base

02:43therefore we have requested the civilian emergency services services to come in

02:49and support us. Today we have VicPol and we have a fire rescue and we have

02:54Victorian ambulance service. This exercise was kept a secret from them. We have

03:01taught them the theory behind mass cast and yeah after doing PT this morning

03:07they'll put into this role and to be prepared. The reason we keep it a secret

03:12bill for them is for this sort of scenario it can happen at any time and as a

03:17service member when you're wearing this uniform you're always ready to go. We

03:23utilize a lot of mulaging, role players, smoke machine and the environment to make it

03:29more realistic because in a stressful environment you tend to create mistakes

03:34and it is better for you to create a mistake in a training environment where

03:39we can test and adjust than to happen in real life. I think they went quite well

03:44there are a lot of lesson lines both for from a staff point of view as well as the

03:49students point of view. In the past this sort of exercise is done in a

03:54tabletop environment where it's safer and the learners sit around on table however we

04:00have changed it into a more practical exercise to get them getting used to the

04:05equipment holding weapons and the physical behind it dragging our

04:11casualties. For the role players we have set up casualties we also have set up

04:16bystanders so they are your tick-tock personnel start filming and trying to

04:21make up make a ruckus for our students

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