More than 60 staff from the Launceston General Hospital, along with staff from Ambulance Tasmania, the Tasmania Fire Service and volunteers tested their responses around a mock disaster on Wednesday. 

The mock scenario, a two-bus crash, “caused” about 60 casualties of varying degrees.

The disaster was simulated at the TFS Youngtown headquarters, with volunteers enacting patients bringing the situation to life with consistent groaning and screaming while stuck in a flipped bus. 

The TFS responded to the incident to secure the scene and extract victims.

Ambulance Tasmania and the LGH medical assistance team were also deployed. 

LGH dealt with “patients” in the Code Brown escalation-level situation. 

Staff from the emergency, surgery, intensive care and anaesthetics departments at the LGH worked with the hospital’s Emergency Operations Centre. 

Observers from the Royal Hobart Hospital and the Department of Health and Human Services were present throughout the exercise to provide feedback to the LGH about the response.

Exercises are held every two years to test the LGH’s capacity, and emergency nurse Dan Remnitz said the mock-up incident took about two years to plan. 

“We here in Launceston have been fortunate, we don’t have a lot of these events, but it is very important, if we don’t test our systems, we don’t know that they work,” Mr Remnitz said. 

“We have a whole Code Brown, which is a mass casualty event exercise, so we will be running all our nursing and medical staff through how to react real-time to an overwhelming amount of casualties,” he said. 

“There should be no impact from today’s exercise, everything should be business as normal at the hospital.”