HELENA — It's hard to know when tragedy will strike, and Carroll College is prepared for disaster at their annual Mock Mass Casualty event and the debut of their new Mobile Health Unit.
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“There has been a lot of research done that doing mock drills like this increases resiliency in nurses, so that is something we want to start to bring into our program,” Kate Pieper, an assistant nursing professor at Carroll, says.
The event is conducted by Carroll’s nursing department. It runs three times throughout the day with the help of local medical teams and a helicopter.
In the mock mass casualty, around 50 people were injured or killed in an explosion at the Capitol.
“Obviously, these patients are not real and actually dying, so it gives us a little bit of that safe area to be like okay this is what I think is happening," senior nursing student, Elaina Patten, says. "Then our professors or mentors can be like, think about it in this other way."
Nursing students triage victims on the practice field. After they are assessed, the mock victims are then taken to a hospital station.
Senior nursing student Steph Hodges is thankful for this opportunity to pave her future in the medical field.
“I have got the training, not only do I have the lectures, but I also have the physical work behind it,” Hodges says.
The nursing students are not alone, they have a new team member.
The Carroll Mobile Health Unit is a fully equipped trailer designed to deliver personalized assessment, screening, and education.
The debut of the mobile health unit marks a transformative step in Carroll’s mission to bridge healthcare gaps across Montana’s rural and underserved communities.
“The mission of our mobile health unit is really to engage the community a lot more and have our students be engaged with bringing health to our communities and not just having it centered,” Pieper says.
The mobile health unit will now begin to travel to underserved communities across the Treasure State.
