SWFRS and partners demonstrate the power of multi-agency response

Now in its sixth year, the simulation has grown significantly since it started in 2021, with more agencies, resources, and specialist expertise joining each year. This year’s exercise featured four complex scenarios, each based on real world trends, appropriate wreckage, causality injuries, and challenges that emergency services may encounter when responding to incidents.

Students from Cardiff University’s School of Medicine observed the simulation, with some volunteering in the scenarios, as part of their course to evaluate how the emergency services work together on the scene of an incident. 

Every doctor from Cardiff University who has completed the undergrad course over the past six years, and all those going forward, will experience this hands-on insight into what patients go through before reaching hospital. The aim is to build better understanding, empathy, and clinical decision-making skills by exposing future clinicians to the pressures and complexities of a real emergency scene.

The exercise isn’t a staged performance, each agency completes its own risk assessment and responds exactly as it would at a real incident. Crews receive no advance briefings, ensuring authentic decision-making under pressure.

Using medical students as casualties adds significant realism. Their understanding of how the body reacts to specific injuries allows responders to carry out assessments naturally and receive accurate, lifelike feedback instead of relying on written casualty cards.

In days leading up to the exercise, over 200 students attended a joint lecture delivered by SWFRS, SWP, WAST and Public Health Wales, which included an overview of Project EDWARD – Every Day Without A Road Death, a project designed to promote good practice in road safety. As well as an insight into how the control room operates from SWFRS Station Manager, George Fisher.

On the morning of the simulation, SWFRS’s Road Safety teams also delivered sessions on the Fatal Five, the five most significant courses of road traffic collisions on UK roads, particularly relevant as many students on the course fall within the 16–25 age group –  the demographic statistically most at risk of being involved in an RTC.

A Cardiff Medicine School student who also volunteered as one of the casualties in the scenario said:

“You rarely get to see how emergency services work together. In my scenario, which involved someone impaled by a knife, the paramedics arrived first but couldn’t enter until the scene was declared safe. That moment alone showed me just how coordinated and high‑pressure incidents really are.”

The event is a clear demonstration of how SWFRS is More Than Fire, showcasing the Service’s capabilities in RTC response, casualty care, and trauma management.

Watch Manager Richie Matthews, SWFRS Training Department, said:

“These simulation events are more than a nice to do, they are a need to. There is so much value in understanding how other emergency services work and respond to incidents. Being familiar of the approaches other services help us all to work together to save lives and reduce harm.”

For SWFRS crews participating in the simulation, the event provides rare opportunities to train within complex scenarios and vehicle types, such as buses and vans, not usually available during station-based training. The scenarios are intentionally challenging, offering opportunities for personal growth, particularly in strengthening command‑and‑control capabilities.

Each year the event builds on the lessons learned from the previous year and other simulation events, with the aim to continue growing and enhancing the experience for volunteers, partners and medical students.