BONNYVILLE – It started with a phone call. “911, what is your emergency?” A panicked voice would answer, at times incoherent and with incomplete sentences.
Rather than sitting in desks, high school students from Bonnyville learned of the perils of impaired and distracted driving during a mock collision held on April 17. The event was organized by the Bonnyville Regional Fire Authority (BRFA) and held in the parking lot of the Bonnyville and District Centennial Centre (C2).
The mock collision started with the call to a 911 dispatcher – two vehicles with young occupants had collided in what was deemed a ‘T-bone collision.’ The occupants had injuries varying in severity.
As the rain continued to pour down and emergency crews arrived on scene, the mock collision felt even more realistic. Showing up on scene with sirens blaring were firefighters, paramedics, police and eventually victim services members.
For more than 20 minutes, students watched as their fellow classmates participating in the drill were bandaged up, extricated from vehicles, transferred into ambulances on stretchers, and even placed into a body bag.
As the scene played out, the regional fire chief of the BRFA, Dan Heney, outlined what was happening so that students could understand the decisions being made by the first responders.
Moving out of the rain and into the C2, the GenMec ACL Hall was transformed into an emergency department. The most critical patients were brought in by EMS and transferred into the care of ER nurses who worked to stabilize the patients.
Despite the healthcare workers' best efforts, the mock simulation would end with one patient being pronounced deceased and the other being transported by STARS Air Ambulance.
Think twice
Vince Spila is the principal of École Notre Dame High School. Over the last decade, Spila has brought groups of students to roughly six mock collisions that have been put on by the BRFA.
He believes events like this make students more aware of the grim realities of impaired driving.
“We talked about it a lot. So, something like this, where you can actually see it happening. I think it affects the kids,” he said.
Spila hopes that teens who have observed the mock collision think twice before getting into a vehicle with a driver who is impaired or getting behind the wheel themselves if they are impaired.
In 2010, Spila recalls receiving a heartbreaking call informing him that one of his former students had been killed in a collision caused by a drunk driver. “It tore the community apart,” he said.
“The more that kids are aware, the more they understand, I think especially when they are starting to get their licences, starting to go to more parties in high school, that this will make a big difference in the choices they make,” he said.
Spila believes that events like the one organized by the BRFA are a key in turning the tide on impaired driving, whether that involves alcohol or cannabis.
‘It was more impactful than I expected’
Samuel Shaffrick is a year away from being eligible to get his driver's licence. He was also one of the student participants in the mock collision.
Shaffrick, who has never observed or participated in a mock collision before, was cast as one of the parents who arrived on scene and was kept back by police from seeing his injured child.
“I didn't expect how physically real it would feel. When I started to imagine how it would feel if it were real, I couldn't feel my fingers and my whole body was shaking – it was more impactful than I expected,” he said. “I could see from looking out at the crowd that some people were definitely feeling affected by it.”
After seeing the reaction of some of his classmates, Shaffrick feels that his peers felt the magnitude of the event and will want to avoid it from happening to them.
“Most of all, it just gave me more respect for the calling to healthcare,” he said.
Impact on healthcare workers
Elizabeth Moon, the ER unit manager at the Bonnyville Health Centre, was one of half a dozen emergency department healthcare workers that participated in the mock collision on April 17.
Following the simulation, Moon and other first responders took turns sharing the personal impact of trauma on themselves and their colleagues.
“As healthcare providers, we hold tremendous personal responsibility for the outcome of cases like these – and when they result in death, we feel like we have failed even though, objectively – we know there is nothing we could have done,” Moon told the auditorium full of high school students.
“When we see cases like this, a young healthy person who dies from their injuries, we can’t help but run through all the things we could have done differently... this kind of anxious thinking doesn’t stay at work. It comes home with you.”
Moon shared the lingering impacts caused by responding to trauma and the toll it takes on healthcare workers.
“It’s not uncommon for nurses to have vivid nightmares about the traumatic events we experience [on the job],” she said. “We carry the impact of these traumas with us for weeks, months, years. I can tell you, in detail, about every single traumatic death I’ve ever been involved in during the 10 years I’ve been a nurse.”
Referencing a medical journal article, Prevalent posttraumatic stress disorder among emergency department personnel, Moon noted that nearly 26 per cent of emergency nurses meet the diagnostic criteria for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.
She told students that while much of what her and her coworkers experience on the job can’t be avoided – a lot of it can. Driving home the message to students: don't drive distracted and don’t drive under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
The morning wrapped up with a presentation from Kevin Brooks, whose life was changed after a drunk driving incident that occurred almost 20 years ago.
Brooks told students what it had been like to wake up in a hospital bed, unable to speak only to learn that he would never walk again and that his friend Brendon, a passenger in the car he was driving, had not survived the crash.