Justin Barron just checked in for his shift on a Monday during his internal medicine clerkship this summer at Prisma Health Greenville Memorial Hospital when the call came over the intercom: medical emergency.  

“Usually that’s kind of background noise to me, because I’m not on a code team,” said Barron, a third-year medical student at USC School of Medicine Greenville.  

But on this morning, he was ready to help when it was needed. “The attending resident jumped up and she said, ‘Oh, I can tell that’s hemodialysis,’ which we were right next to.

“It’s chaotic because people just start arriving,” Barron added. “There is someone with medications, someone who has charts open, and my resident is over there doing compressions and checking the airway on the patient. There was a provider there getting an advanced airway. And so, I just started doing compressions and helping with defibrillator pad placement.”

Barron learned basic life support during his Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) training at SOMG and additional life-saving training before he began clerkship in his third year of medical school. It was this EMT training as an M1 that provided the foundational training that prepared him to be able to step in during the emergency.  

USC School of Medicine Greenville was one of the first schools in the country to integrate EMT training and certification into its first-year medical curriculum.  

The 200-hour program teaches students how to deliver emergency healthcare to patients. The training culminates in a Disaster Day, as the student’s final exercise after completing their training. The Disaster Day provides an opportunity for medical students to put their emergency medicine training and medical coursework to action, in a real-world simulation.  

It also prepares them to be able to answer the call and help their community in the event of a disaster. Medical students at SOMG have helped in such instances, administering vaccines during COVID-19 and helping provide around-the-clock care in the wake of Hurricane Helene.  

“We may not know what the next emergency will be, but we know that our students will be ready to help,” said Dr. Page Bridges, emergency physician at Prisma Health and associate professor at SOMG.  

This year’s Disaster Day will be held on Sept. 21 and Sept. 22.  

“It is a pragmatic approach to the core concepts that are key to medical education,” said Dr. Elkes, Enterprise Medical Director of Preparedness and Mobile Integrated Health with Prisma Health and instructor of emergency medicine at SOMG. “It teaches in an applied way right off the bat.” First and second-year medical students at School of Medicine Greenville participate in Disaster Day.

Read more on previous Disaster Day experiences here.

From day one, medical students at SOMG are prepared to help, whether it is in the Emergency Department, in the community after a natural disaster, or in the doctor’s or specialist’s offices where they will one day work.  

During Disaster Day stimulations, medical students make sure to check on mock patients and provide life-saving care. The simulations are designs to be realistic as possible, to introduce the stress and unpredictability of a major emergency event or natural disaster.  

SOMG faculty, staff and Prisma emergency staff led the simulation with the goal of verifying that students are capable to providing care to someone in an emergency situation. “We set the scenario up,” Elkes said. “But aside from that, the students are in charge of leadership. They are in charge of their own reporting structure and leadership structure and the care of all of those mock patients on scene.”

The simulations stay with medical students — providing training that will be helpful to the future physicians. But their efforts to care for their community starts before they graduate medical school.  

After the Storm  

Following Hurricane Helene that swept through the Upstate in September, 2024, state health officials set up a 24-hour Emergency Medical Needs Shelter at Bon Secours Wellness Arena for individuals requiring electricity-dependent medical equipment and round-the-clock care.

More than 160 students at SOMG took what they learned during their EMT training and Disaster Day drills before the storm and applied it in real life, as they volunteered at the emergency shelter, providing nearly 2,000 hours of service and care.  

Madeline Reilly was there when the shelter opened and took on a leadership role helping to ensure the shelter was set up to triage patients and operate smoothly.

Reilly (now a fourth-year medical student at SOMG) and her classmates who volunteered at the shelter helped make sure patients took their correct medications and set up and monitor oxygen for patients, as well as comforting patients to help ease any concerns in the aftermath of the storm.  

Because of their EMT certification, SOMG students were able to help administer oxygen and the patients’ medications.  

“Some of them had left their family members behind to come to this clinic,” Reilly said. “So I think it was fairly distressing for some of the patients, of course, to leave their family behind.”  

Reilly recalls helping one patient who came in at night to the shelter.

“We asked what the last time he had taken his blood sugar,” Reilly said. “And he said he hadn’t been able to just with the condition of his home and getting supplies. And I remember taking a blood sugar on this patient and it being high.” Reilly and nursing staff then worked together to get his blood sugar back down to a manageable level.  

Reilly, who hopes to go into an anesthesiology residency program, believes her experiences during the EMT training and as a volunteer in the shelter will stay with her, helping her be ready for the moments when things don’t go as planned.