Emergency Readiness Drill Simulates Mass Casualty Response Under Threat of Corona
Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center carried out an emergency simulation exercise today in cooperation with the IDF’s Homefront Command and Magen David Adom. The exercise was designed to simulate a mass casualty incident and was coordinated by Shaare Zedek’s Disaster Preparedness Teams.
The exercise was completed successfully and focused on elements to respond to the current challenges where a selection of the simulated wounded patients were known to be infected with COVID-19.


Shaare Zedek’s Director General Professor Ofer Merin said, “Shaare Zedek remains prepared for all types of incidents even as we continue to find ourselves in this period defined by Corona. We continue to train our staff for mass casualty incidents that require complex responses coordinated with all the relevant agencies. While we hope that we never have to put this training into real time use, we take pride in serving as the hospital that stands ready to care for all the people of Jerusalem whether we are in times of peace and quiet or facing uncertainty and major emergencies.”
Sarah Goldberg, Nursing Coordinator for Disaster Response at Shaare Zedek said, "Confronting the possibility of a mass casualty incident combined with Corona care represents a major logistical and operational challenge both in terms of protecting our staff as well as ensuring patients are similarly protected and properly treated. It was therefore very important that we trained in such a scenario to ensure that all our teams including medical, nursing, security, and IT and logistics are all in sync. Through these exercises, we are able to further improve our levels of readiness should such an incident occur.”