CVM Students Put 'One Health' Into Practice During Disaster Day
Posted February 13, 2018
The gymnasium of the Central Baptist Church Family Life Center
in Bryan is filled with more cots than the eye can absorb in a
single glance. People wander aimlessly through the room, past
emergency stations set up for triage or to dispense medicine, as
students meet and attend to the needs of the injured or ill.
Screams randomly echo off the walls as a young man lies on one
of those cots while Texas A&M students hover over him,
assessing the dog bites on his leg and face. Another young man
walks past, searching for his dog. Has anyone seen his dog?
It sounds like the scene from a pandemic genre movie, but it’s
actually all a part of the ninth annual Disaster Day training
hosted in March by the Texas A&M College of Nursing. The
largest student-run mass casualty simulation event in the country
brought together more than 300 students from nursing, pharmacy,
medical, and, for the first time, from the College of Veterinary
Medicine & Biomedical Sciences (CVM), all of whom were employed
to act as care providers for more than 400 volunteers portraying
victims of a hurricane.
Students participate in Disaster Day simulations; 2017 was the
first year CVM students participated in the activity.
Students were able to gain experience by putting into practice the
knowledge and skills they are acquiring within all of Texas
A&M’s medical disciplines. While nursing and medical students
assisted actors with “broken bones” or “flesh wounds,” 30
veterinary students reacted to three vet-med scenarios written by
Michelle Kurkowski and Laura Hurst, third-year veterinary students
and co-presidents of the Student One Health Association.
Kurkowski and Hurst, who were instrumental in the CVM’s
involvement in Disaster Day and served as the vet-med liaisons
during the event, specifically created the cases with input from
students from the other colleges in an effort to incorporate both
human and animal medicine.
The scenarios were designed to create a realistic experience
that students might encounter in a similar situation as
professionals; they included a man and his dogs showing signs of a
bacterial disease and a girl suffering from head trauma who was
brought in with her dog; it was ultimately discovered that the girl
was epileptic and the animal was her service dog.
“The vet students and the medical/nursing students had to
realize that the dog and the girl needed to be kept together at all
costs,” Kurkowski said. “Failure to recognize this would result in
the girl seizing without warning.”
In another incident, a child was bitten by a husky amidst a dog
fight.
“The owner took the dog to the tent for veterinary care and
informed the students that the dog wasn’t current on its rabies
vaccination. The bitten child was in the medical tent and it was
the veterinary students’ job to find the attending physician and
inform him that the dog wasn’t current on its vaccine,” Kurkowski
said. “The mother of the child demanded the dog be euthanized, and
the medical and veterinary students had to diffuse the
situation.”
The best part of practicing in this simulated environment,
according to Kurkowski, was the collaboration that emerged between
the veterinary, medical, and nursing students.
“The veterinary students greatly enjoyed the chance to interact
with the other colleges and get in on the main action. They also
remarked that they learned a lot clinically,” she said. “The senior
students were vital in helping to teach the younger students how to
approach each clinical case and make decisions.
“The medical and nursing students began to seek out the
veterinary teams for assistance when needed; they even began to
consult with the veterinary teams on cases that were not originally
written as med-vet interface cases,” Kurkowski said. “The students
seemed to enjoy the additional layer of complexity to the scenario
once it was clear what was expected of them and how to respond to
veterinary situations. The veterinary students were able to teach
new things to the human medical providers and vice versa.”
Michelle Kurkowski and Laura Hurst, the vet-med liaisons for
Disaster Day 2017
Likewise, students learned a lot from what went wrong during the
day; because this was the first year that veterinary cases were
incorporated into Disaster Day, awareness and communication were
two hurdles that had to be overcome early.
“These experiential training opportunities in which our Texas
A&M students participate help them think outside the box; work
with interdisciplinary teams of medical, nursing, pharmacy, and
veterinary professionals; and successfully address disasters,” said
Rosina (Tammi) Krecek, research professor for Texas A&M’s
Global One Health initiative. “Such training builds confidence and
readiness in our students to face inevitable challenges such as
natural disasters, pandemics, and other catastrophes.”
In addition, members of Texas A&M’s Veterinary Emergency
Team (VET)—the largest and most sophisticated veterinary medical
disaster response team in the country— set up tents outside to
support the cause, helping students understand what it’s like to
deploy for a disaster on the veterinary side by working through
animal cases.
“It’s not just taking care of animals when you’re in a disaster
environment; there’s noise and chaos around you, people constantly
coming in with this or that problem or needing you to talk to the
media or offering to volunteer,” said Deb Zoran, professor in the
Department of Small Animal Clinical Sciences and VET member. “The
chaos of a disaster environment is similar to all of the other
things that are going on while you’re just trying to be a
veterinarian; that’s a really good skill set to learn for
life.”
While these devastating events are hard to mimic through
simulation—in Brazoria County, for example, the VET saw more than
350 companion animals over a 10-day period, accounting for about
30–35 animals a day coming in suddenly and sporadically—Zoran said
there’s no question that the activity was valuable for
students.
“It is a great experience that allows the fourth-year veterinary
students opportunities to practice being team leaders. Perhaps most
importantly for the first-, second-, and third-year veterinary
students, it is the first time they’re introduced to disaster
response and the concept of triage and stabilization,” Zoran said.
“This training will help them as they continue in school because
it’s just another way of developing the skills of thinking things
through and problem solving.”
Kurkowski and Hurst also tied in an educational component
following the simulation by providing handouts and bringing in CPR
dummies to teach participants about canine CPR; they hope to
establish an even greater presence at Disaster Day next year to
increase the learning opportunities for everyone.
“There is never a large-scale disaster, natural or man-made,
that doesn’t involve animals in some way; people are very attached
to their animals and often consider them members of the family, and
anyone who works in disaster management needs to understand this
and have a plan for how to handle it,” Kurkowski said.
“That’s why it was so important for us to participate in
Disaster Day; we wanted to add another layer of reality to the
incredible learning experience that the School of Nursing has
created,” she said. “We also wanted to show students from all of
the schools the communication and collaboration that is necessary
when animals are inevitably involved, so that they are better
prepared for the real deal.”
###
For more information about the Texas
A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences,
please visit our website at vetmed.tamu.edu or join us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Contact Information: Megan Palsa, Executive Director of
Communications, Media & Public Relations, Texas A&M College
of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Science; mpalsa@cvm.tamu.edu;
979-862-4216; 979-421-3121 (cell)
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