Major incident exercise staged at University of Cumbria

An exercise designed to replicate a major emergency is taking place at the University of Cumbria's Ambleside campus.

Students who are learning about policing as well as those on paramedic and forensic science courses are being put through their paces over two days with multiple crime scenes.

They include a man apparently found unconscious with major injuries after being beaten up and a woman discovered on a bathroom floor after reportedly taking a drugs overdose. 

"The background to this story is that we have two organized crime groups," explained Ashleigh Hunt, the Head of Teaching, Learning and Student Experience at the university.

"What's happened is that a member from each of those families has decided to get married, so there are some really high tensions around and a background of drugs and weapons."

The students have to respond as they would in a real-life situation and find out information as they go. 

Policing student Leatitia Gunputrar says it's been very true to life. 

"A lot more realistic than I thought to be honest, seeing all the other crews get involved and put what they know to practice as well is really boosting my confidence, just on how realistic it actually has been."

Fellow policing student Joseph Carter agrees: "Turning up you don't know exactly what's going on. You have to figure that out. Get the ambulance crews there, brief them on what you have. Same with CSI as well. So I would say it's pretty realistic."

Paramedic science students, Freya Sadler and Chris Moore, are also grateful for the experience. 

She said: "It's been a really good chance to sort of get some real, well as close to real, world experience as you can before you go out on the road. So it's been really good."

"Yeah, definitely," adds Chris. "We get a lot of this on the road, obviously. Then it's quite a high-pressure situation.

"So a paramedic mentors and sometimes they have to step in and take over if we do something wrong. Whereas at least now, we are given the opportunity to make a mistake and learn if there is."

Members of staff play the part of some of the victims affected by the crimes, with Forensic Science Lecturer Dr Andy Chick being made up to look like someone who had been severely beaten. 

"It's been really good fun, actually," he says. "It's not every day you get to mimic being beaten with a baseball bat and led out on a spinal board, which is what happened to me this morning."

It has been codenamed Operation Decade because the first exercise of this type started at the university 10 years ago.

Around 100 students learning about becoming forensic scientists, paramedics or police officers have been taking part.

Not all is as it seems with one "crime scene" turning out to be simply a man suffering from a medical emergency rather than being the victim of a crime.

The students had to work all that out for themselves and analyse samples from each of the crime scenes back in the lab.  

More than a thousand students have been through this major incident scenario in the last 10 years - helping to develop their skills for when they have to tackle such incidents for real.

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