Hospital Surge: MCI
Put your team inside a hospital under pressure.
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Multiple groups can play concurrently, each guided by a trained facilitator.
Description
Hospital Surge: Mass Casualty Incident (MCI) is a fast-paced, real-time simulation game that puts your team inside a hospital during a mass casualty surge. Played on a hospital map with modular room boards, teams take on the Triage, Treatment, and Incident Command roles. Each role makes decisions about their actions as new patients arrive every minute throughout multiple timed rounds.
Players have limited staff capacity and resources, forcing them to balance immediate and future needs as they would in a real-world incident. Players must triage patients accurately, allocate treatment and resources, manage beds and supplies, and maintain a shared situational awareness as conditions intensify. Mistakes can compound, corridors may start to fill, and teams must adapt before the surge overwhelms the hospital.
Hospital Surge is designed to offer hospital emergency managers a new and engaging way to practice challenges of a surge. The game develops players' broad strategy around capacity, communications, patient care, and scarce resource management. Every session generates observable decision-making data, improves communication between team members in different roles, and allows them to practice core skills needed during a hospital surge or hazard. The game will prepare your team for mass casualty surge plan reviews by providing an experiential way to ground the reviews in a simulated exercise.
Learning Objectives
- Strengthen coordination between triage, treatment, and incident command.
- Practice resource management, allocating limited staff, supplies, beds, and space as demand shifts.
- Manage patient flow and treatment under pressure and uncertainty.
Game Details
This 5-round game unfolds in timed rounds, covering the first 6 hours of a surge.
Learn the System: To begin, the game has a built-in tutorial to help players learn the system before the timed rounds start. At the outset, the hospital is about 80% full on an ordinary day and, during the tutorial, players work through treatment and business as usual.
Manage the Surge: A mass casualty incident brings a surge of patients. Every minute new patients are arriving in triage, and events are unfolding each round. Roles add abilities during rounds to cancel appointments, rest exhausted staff, renew supplies, and open beds where there were none. Between rounds, patients worsen if they haven't been fully treated or attended to in the correct room.
Score and Debrief: Following the game, teams discuss how they managed their roles, how they communicated, and what they would have done differently. This is a scored game based on treated, untreated and lost patients.
*This game can be replayed for different hazards in a hospital. The scenario changes the patient mix, not the process, so the same game can be run to focus on a mass casualty incident, an infectious outbreak, or any other hazard your hospital plans for.
What's Included and Customization
Each game of Hospital Surge: MCI includes:
*Due to the complex nature of this game, facilitation can be more difficult than other CAPTRS games. If you are not comfortable with facilitating yourself after a training session with CAPTRS, we can provide a bid for exercise facilitation.
Elements of this game may be customized:
There is a standard configuration for this game that creates a complete experience using an abstracted setup of a generic hospital and an MCI surge. If you'd like to simulate your hospital conditions specifically, our team can help guide you through a custom configuration. It will include extra game components and consulting time with the CAPTRS team. Configuration and customization elements can include:
Scale: rooms, bed capacities, and resources, from small community hospitals to large multi-pod campuses.- Map: print and use your own map.
- Cause of surge: Using your team's own vulnerability analysis of the possible hazards you want to plan for in your hospital, you can use the game as the foundation to run practice scenarios on different specific hazards beyond an MCI.
For all customization requests, CAPTRS requires a discovery call with our team. We will then provide a bid of costs associated with the customization.
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Pricing is based on scope & use case