A disaster medicine course for Canadian medical students: first implementation of a large-scale mass-casualty simulation

Mass-casualty incidents have a significant global impact. Despite calls for improved disaster-preparedness training, most medical curriculums do not include formal disaster-medicine education. In 2021, the Medical Council of Canada introduced new disaster-medicine learning objectives. This article presents a mass-casualty-incident course for 3rd-year Canadian medical students. The course includes lectures, and a large-scale simulation of an explosion scene, field triage zone, and simulated emergency department (ED). The simulation incorporated “Dark-team-member” facilitators and 17 live actor and 8 mannequin patients with moulage. Pre-/post-event evaluation data was collected. One-hundred and twenty medical students participated in the course. Confidence in managing a real mass-casualty incident, on a scale from 1 to 10 (no-confidence to completely confident) significantly improved based on a Mann–Whitney U test, p < 0.05. Few formal medical student mass-casualty-incident courses exist. Combining “Dark-team-members” with live actors, imbedding clinician facilitators with medical students, and having a simulation with a continuous disaster scene to the ED are unique to this course. The methodology is presented for future replication.