Photo By Andria Allmond | Donna Bibber, an exercise PATRIOT North 2016 role player from Wilton, Wis., sits while...... read more read more
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Tech. Sgt. Andria Allmond
111th Attack Wing Public Affairs
VOLK FIELD AIR NATIONAL GUARD BASE, Wis. -- “Put more blood, more blood,” she instructs a Guardsman while smiling like a Cheshire cat. “By now, it’s clotting. And you’ll need bruising.” With scarlet-colored fluid dripping from the silicone sliver, the reflected glint from sunlight increases the grotesque appearance of the gooey gash.
Moulage – the art of applying mock injuries for training of emergency response teams, medical providers and military personnel—can be shocking. But this grisly procedure has proven indispensable in creating realistic medical scenarios for exercise PATRIOT North 2016, held at and around here, July 19-21.
In order to administer the ultra-realistic-looking prosthetics, the National Guard and Mile Bluff Medical Center, Mauston, Wisconsin, relied on moulage makeup artists with real-world experience – as emergency medical service (EMS) providers. So while a skilled eye and artistic hand help, familiarity with treating injuries, wounds and illnesses intensifies the genuineness for exercise participants.
”Being in EMS, we see a lot of things: gunshot wounds, hangings, amputations,” said Rebecca Minges, a Cincinnati, Ohio, paramedic and haunted house make-up artist. “This is what real-life injuries look like. There’s a difference between what we do and what Hollywood does. We’ve seen it in real life and it’s not pretty, it’s actually quite horrific.”
Minges said the objective is to re-create the most convincing wounds in order to produce the highest quality training. “When someone is confronted with a [mock] patient presenting a condition that looks real, it causes an adrenaline rush; and people seeing it will react more like they actually would in the field.” And that response is exactly what civilian and military exercise planners wanted to generate. The annual PATRIOT North exercise’s theme is for Guardsmen and their civilian counterparts to train as they would respond in a real-world domestic operation.
Dr. Timothy Bjelland, the Mile Bluff Medical Center emergency room director and chief medical officer assisting with the exercise, said that the most important element of any medical exercise is for it to be as real as possible. “Moulage really makes you have to go back and look at the various wounds - it helps make us think through all the steps…Often with trauma patients, the mechanism of injury is crucial. The amount of force and location is very important. And it helps us talk about the correct way to evaluate a patient, the steps involved and ensure that the patient obtains appropriate resources.”
The doctor continued by saying that this is especially true when treating a large quantity of patients at one time, as was the case during the exercise. The civilian medical providers valued the gruesome artistry; and the military medical members concurred.
“A lot of these [Air National Guard] medics aren’t medics in their civilian jobs, so they don’t see these types of traumas regularly,” said Capt. Broc Nichelson, of the 110th Medical Group from the Michigan Air National Guard and the Health Response Team (HRT) nurse for PATRIOT North 2016. “The moulage takes you back a little bit when you see it. So to get a visual of it helps make our medics more resilient for when they may need to treat [these injuries] in the real world.”
That resiliency leads to increased focus of providers, which ultimately lends itself to more efficient and effective medical care. And while military and civilian medical personnel are highly trained to deal with the wide array of injuries that can afflict patients; the same can be said for the artists on site.
Jennifer Prejean, has a history in the New Orleans, Louisiana, area as an emergency medical technician, was also layering latex, silicone, paint and gels to recreate what she’s seen as an EMT for exercise PATRIOT North 2016.
“We know the difference between what a 50-caliber gunshot wound and a 20-caliber gunshot wound look like,” she said while methodically daubing a fusion of paints to create bruises on a role player. “But sometimes it’ just a little shading, dabbing here and there. Depending on the injury, you don’t always want a big effect because that’s not what the condition actually looks like.”
It’s in the nuances that moulage magic happens.
“If someone is going into anaphylactic shock, there isn’t an irrefutable outward appearance,” she said. “So in that case, we’d just work with a little color and it’s up to the role-player to give the provider the symptoms.”
The moulage artists said they had fun working with the civilian military agencies, but they were also successful in providing a valuable, and impressive, addition to the annual exercise
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“This is unique,” said Nichelson, a nurse anesthetist in his civilian job. “We actually were able to see a gentlemen who had an actual amputated arm, but the moulage team made it appear to be a fresh amputation with blood actually squirting out. It was one of the best works I’ve seen so far.”
| Date Taken: | 07.21.2016 |
| Date Posted: | 07.21.2016 15:55 |
| Story ID: | 204646 |
| Location: | MAUSTON, WI, US |
| Web Views: | 148 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
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