The Inter-Hospital Coordinating Council organized a major emergency drill with three local hospitals: Northern Nevada Medical Center, St Mary's Regional Medical Center and Renown Regional Medical Center.
Each hospital, with help from REMSA, set up a tent outside their facility to practice a scenario where local hospitals are receiving so many patients they have to use exterior tents to treat patients.
"No matter what your area of interest is, practice makes perfect," Chief Medical Officer of the Acute Care Division at Renown Paul Sierzenski says. "And given the fact that we're talking about facilities that are external to the hospital, it's really important that our staff and our team are able to touch and feel the devices that they would use in such an emergency."
He says they were ready to deploy the tents during the California wildfires in case a lot of people needing care came to Reno, but they never set them up.
"We do live in an area that potentially has wildfires as well as potential earthquakes," Sierzenski says. "So we have to be prepared for that."
In order to make the practice realistic, hospitals got volunteers to act out serious medical conditions.
"We have kind of an assigned diagnoses and we have to play for the doctors and the staff what that diagnoses is," volunteer patient John Novak says. "I have got a pancreas and a gallbladder that is having problems."
It's his first time volunteering for something like this, and he enjoyed his role.
"Oh it's fun, it's been great," Novak says. "They've taken good care of us. We start this morning at 6 o clock, I got a little make up for things."
But he didn't volunteer for the chance to act. He did I to better prepare medical professionals for an extraordinary experience.
"In case we have a true emergency," Novak says. "It's one thing to exercise and do these things on paper and talk about it. It's another thing to have it in your parking lot."
The Nevada Division of Behavioral Health and Science owns six tents for an event like this. Three are kept in Reno with REMSA, and the other three are at the Behavioral Health an Science building in Carson City.
That means REMSA got to practice setting up the tents, in case they need to do so in a hurry.
