Menage à Trois Bingo

Not the same as a teddy bear picnic, though it might have started as one.

Last night was the second class in my CERT training, Medical Operations Part 1: Triage. We learned about the three things you treat as a part of doing triage: Airway, Bleeding, and Shock, and then about the order of checking and about tagging victims as Walking Wounded, Immediate, Delayed, or Dead.

So as an exercise, the trainers had set up the warehouse with about twenty injured teddy bears. They were hidden on shelves, in boxes, behind things...one was hanging up on a fence. Each bear had a card describing its response to the triage steps, and we had to tag them.

The exercise was more notable for failures than successes, I think.

Where we went wrong, or lessons to take to the next exercise:
1. Didn't bring a pen to make notes of number and locations of victims. Memory did not suffice.
2. Didn't call out for the walking wounded before entering the scene. (This may have been due to an assumption on our part, that teddies can't walk.)
3. Teams all searching the same spaces at the same time instead of allocating sections.
4. A couple of bears that should have been immediate got tagged delayed, and one that should've been tagged delayed was tagged walking wounded. Likely that the first two died before we got back to bring them out.
5. Missed one bear completely. Was in a box under a table. We did find several others that were in boxes, however.