Summary: CBRNE disasters cause severe social disruption and require a special medical response. The Center has prepared a CBRNE disaster response manual in advance of the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Kobe. The Center has similarly held several table-top drills in the neighborhood of the city center to simulate a terrorist attack, but the number of participants was about 20-30 people each time. Therefore, an exercise scenario of multiple patients injured by an accident at a nearby chemical plant was proposed. Before the exercise, a series of study sessions were practiced to deepen the staff’s understanding of CBRNE, including an outline of CBRNE, decontamination tent set-up, and so on. A scenario was developed in which multiple walk-in patients, after dermal or inhalation contamination by chemical agents, collapsed at the hospital entrance, and the initial response was made by multi-professional staff, including a reception clerk, ER nurses, and physicians. On the day of the drill, more than 70 people participated. In the post-drill questionnaire, there were many favorable comments on the drill itself. Many of the participants requested that the next training should be based on an explosion, which could occur in a neighbor’s. As for CBRNE disasters, especially chemical disasters, there have been no mass casualties from terrorist attacks in Japan since the two Sarin gas incidents in 1994 and 1995. On the other hand, chemical disasters such as suicides, accidents, and factory disasters while using toxic agents occur routinely; if the number of the injured/contaminated was too large, or the cause was a terrorist attack in the simulation scenario, participants could hardly view it as realistic. In this CBRNE disaster drill, we believe that the use of “highly probable and realistic training scenarios” raises the sense of urgency and attracts more staff.
Kikuta et al. (Sun,) studied this question.