2017 BDLS

On February 17, 2017, Region 7 Healthcare Coalition hosted Basic Disaster Life Support at the Gaylord University Center. The course had a great turn out with a wide variety of disciplines represented. 

The course began with discussion and lecture about natural disasters and different types of response needed for each scenario. Students were reminded that in addition to victims' physical and mental health complications, responders may be met with critical infrastructure failure and that they would need to respond to natural disasters with an All Hazards Approach. 

Instructors went on to discuss chemical disasters, varying levels of exposure, and proper PPE for each level of chemical exposure. They also discussed the PRE-DISASTER Paradigm, NIMS Incident Management, Triage and Treatment, and Recovery. 

Interestingly, many of the students had varying approaches to triage. In BDLS, instructors try to help students understand time is very limited during triage and during a real life scenario, in the field, triage needs to take place not just accurately, but efficiently. This is a prime example of the usefulness of Advanced Disaster Life Support (ADLS), in which students will have hands on training in lifelike scenarios, including mass casualty and triage. The opportunity to triage the mock-victims will give the students the hands on experience to connect what they've learned in BDLS about triage levels and efficiency to real world scenarios.

​Instructors spoke about nuclear and radiological disasters, their history and current events, casualty management, clinical decision making, situational awareness, hazard assessment, and more. They also discussed varying types of injury and response associated with these disasters and the fear that is generally associated with radiological disasters. Instructors reminded students that with the proper training and exercise, it is possible to push past that fear and respond with effective clinical care to exposed people.

Along with all the physical implications to victims and responders in a disaster, there are immediate and long term mental implications as well. People of all ages and backgrounds will mentally handle a disaster different ways.

Disasters do not discriminate by age. Children and infants are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of disasters because of multiple factors, from anatomic to physiologic to developmental.

At the present time, few communities have plans in place to respond to the special needs of pediatric casualties of a disaster.

Every disaster responder must have a working knowledge of the care and support of pediatric patients, even if the care provider only takes care of adults in his or her usual job. ​
​Children in Disasters, BDLS v.3.2, 2015 National Disaster Life Support Foundation

Victims and responders both will have a psychiatric, psychosocial, or behavioral response to a disaster. Included in the discussion were Psychological Consequences of Disasters and Other Mass Trauma Events and Responder Mental Health Effects and treatment. 

The course wrapped up with biological disasters, CDC classification of Bio-Threats, types of threats, and response. Instructors spent time discussing detection and situational awareness of bio-threats along with incident management and public health notification, hazard assessment, and preventing disease spread. 

​Many of these ideas are expanded upon in greater detail through the hands on experience offered by the Advanced Disaster Life Support Course. If you would like to learn more about our course offerings, we invite you to check out our listings for the May 16th BDLS course, previous ADLS courses (to be offered again next year), and Children in Disasters: Youth Mental Health First Aid.