Médecins Sans Frontières - WEBCLIP - RDSU Training

Unique Identifier Code / URN MSF220326

Date taken / Date Recorded 29/06/2017 12:00 AM

Country France

Commissioning section MSF-SWITZERLAND

Copyright MSF

Usage Rights (MSF) External Media, MSF Publications, Social Media

Formal Consent Copy available no

Editor's rating ★★★★★ (C)

Video format h264 (Main) (avc1 / 0x31637661)

Duration 3m28s

Maximum Size 1920px × 1080px 374.46 MB

Additional Information / Shotlist [on-screen text]
Each year, MSF teams train to
deploy a self-contained surgical unit

the RDSU

[subtitles]
RDSU stands for Rapid Deployment Surgical Unit
It’s a technical structure
that contains one or two operating rooms
with all the related technical facilities and services.

Philip Janssens
Head of technical support to operations

[on-screen text]
Within a few hours, it can be sent
to the four corners of the world

[subtitles]
Here, we set it up in 15 hours.
In the field, when it's set up in “full option” mode,
It’s relatively realistic to do it in 24 hours.

After the earthquake in Haiti,
we realised we needed a structure like this
that can be deployed very quickly to enable us
to provide emergency care.

We’ve completed three rounds of RDSU training,
which means we have now trained a pool of MSF regulars
to set up, deploy and use the RSDU.

[on-screen text]
This time, it was a double exercise
including a simulation of a casualty influx

[subtitles]
We hope for the best;
we are humanitarians, we are as well idealists...
We hope for the best but we have to plan for the worst.

Armando Garcia
Medical support officer for emergency care

The idea is for the teams to prepare for the challenges that they’re going to face
in the field.

[on-screen text]
In particular, the teams are trained
in triage procedure.

[subtitles]
Triage is a medical process that dates back a long time.
It has been performed for many years and means ‘to sort.’
It’s a procedure, a process, that we even do in life;
you have to prioritise, especially in the field.
The environments that MSF is working in are very resource-limited,
sometimes remote. So when we arrive in these areas
we need to do the best for the most.
So triage, especially in a disaster, helps us a lot.

Today, we simulated around 20 patients.
Usually the statistics of war surgery tell us that you have
mostly ‘green’ patients, what we call the walking wounded,
So these patients usually arrive very fast to the facility.
Sometimes not, but the majority were very
similar to the reality and then the most critical patients that
were ‘yellow’ and ‘red’ were less. But of course the team
was challenged to treat severely wounded patients.

The objective of the exercise is to let the teams play, to take decisions
as they take in the field and I think the team reacted very well.
In a disaster or a catastrophe, there’s always chaos.
We cannot prevent it but we can reduce this chaotic response in order to save more lives.

This training should be viewed as a deployment exercise.
Certainly, after this exercise, we'll be quicker than we were before.
When we do it in a real emergency, every minute,
every hour counts.

The training is constantly evolving and is getting better and better.
I'm happy to see this evolution.
The RDSU could well be the first medical facility that provides
an operating theatre in a town or region that has been completely destroyed,
where the medical infrastructure has completely collapsed.

WEBCLIP - RDSU Training - English

WEBCLIP - RDSU Training - English