Princess Margaret Drive in Belize City was the scene of quite a spectacle this morning.
Two vehicles appeared to have been part of a major traffic accident. No, it wasn't real; it was only a test -a pop quiz, if you will. It was done so that emergency personnel from BERT could assess their ambulance crew's fitness and form in responding to a complex crisis. They're in the business where minutes could mean the difference between saving a person's life, or losing them to the serious injuries, so, management wanted to see them in action under the most adverse circumstances.
7News was there, and we spoke to the trainer about the performance of the staff:
Javier Canul - Training Coordinator, BERT
"Since we are in this season, the Easter season, we thought that it was important for everyone to be aware of road safety and not only road safety, but safety in general but since we are BERT, we have decided to let this role out as a accident simulation since we know accidents keep on happening, everybody is drinking, everybody is on the cellular phone and so these things can happen. As a matter of fact this scenario started out with somebody on a cell phone ended up crashing into a vehicle was making its way to the hospital in an emergency. From the moment we get the call, and up to point where the ambulance reacted, when the first 2 medics get on the scene, they realize that this is bigger than what we can handle, they then called for additional help and so more ambulance came and then the ball started to get into play and more in progress. As an EMT our job is to make sure that we can do everything that is possible to save life to get them alive to the hospital, we must do everything that we must do in our scope of practice to make sure they get to the hospital alive and that's what the general concept is of an EMT for a road traffic accident."
Reporter
"In terms of time and the response of different authorities, I counted, it's about 35 minutes that the person who died, until that person left the scene, is that good enough?"
Javier Canul - Training Coordinator, BERT
"Actually we class this as a mass casualty and a mass casualty is anything that uses up all the resources that you need extra resources. So for a mass casualty normally yes, 20 minutes from the time the last patient was removed alive and he had to be cut out and taken out. Normally, as a general rule, we say that there's a 10 minutes golden rule that we have to play with this patient in order to get them out of the accident and so the 20 minutes for us was a goal. The 30 minutes, additional for taking out the patient, well that has nothing to with us, it's just the police and the fire department to get them out but, for us 20 minutes for 8 patients was very good."
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