Press Release
Responding to 911 | Virtual Learning
Remembering September 11, 2001
The National Health and Public Safety History Museum has taken great pride and honor in building our Freedom Chapel. Through partnerships with the Freedom Flag Foundation and Moulage Concepts, we've incorporated a 9/11 remembrance chapel into the museum.
On display is a portion of N-131, a supporting steel column from the 92-95th floors of the North Tower, World Trade Center, New York City, New York.
Before being acquired by the Freedom Flag Foundation, it was in the care of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ) and stored in Hanger 17.
active shooter training
train the trainer
as mci incident training
medical tactical training
Practice and Moulage Realism
What we practice defectively also takes hold.
Silence, a reassuring drowning out of those around me. The bustling open square is abuzz with emotion—new parents lean in, absorbed in the conversation, texting teenagers huddle in detached connection while exuberant babies babble happily over colors, shapes, and smells.
Cutting through the landscape, a large delivery truck counts down the days towards retirement. Years of salt-laden roads and unsuspecting potholes had affected the carriage, it’s muffler kicking out a clamorous exhaust, blackening the large double doors and swirling outwards in a final act of ominous resistance.
Pressing my earbuds tighter, I turn up the silence and scroll through my feeds. There’s a bloodcurdling scream as a body slumps forward.
medical moulage
moulage concepts
moulage
simulation
training
bobbie merica
mastercast
moulage supplies
Moulage Concepts: 2018 EMS World Innovation Award Winner
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Judges' feedback: “I love the idea of a smell library!”
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The MasterCast Medical-Trauma series from Moulage Concepts is a vividly detailed and interactive training system to assist responders in identifying and triaging in prehospital, clinical, trauma, and MCI events. Handcrafted from movie-quality silicone by master artists, MasterCast Moulage combines Hollywood quality with medical science. MasterCast odors and wound drainage may be added to create infectious processes, debridement, tunneling, and packing realism.
July 7, 2018
Bobbie Merica & Moulage Concepts Lead the Way for Healthcare Simulation Realism
The quickest way to increase realism in your medical simulation program is to start utilizing moulage, aka makeup special effects, to better represent clinical patient cases — and the best place to begin is with Bobbie Merica and Moulage Concepts. Since 2009, Moulage Concepts has been providing moulage training workshops, online resources, moulage kits, moulage products, certificate training programs, and even the world’s most comprehensive Moulage Book. Their resources cover all healthcare domains from EMS and active shooter drills to MCIs, Med Surg, Nursing, Hospice Care, Surgery and beyond. The HealthySim team has had the opportunity to receive training from Bobbie and Moulage Concepts and provides it our highest recommendation! (Read More)
April 25, 2018
First responders rehearse Las Vegas-like mass shooting conditions in Pomona training drill
About two songs into a Kenny Chesney show, gunshots began to ring out. Panicked concert-goers, who a few moments ago earlier were gleefully singing along with the famous country crooner, were now running for their lives.
A similar scene unfolded in Las Vegas last year — a country concert where 58 were killed and another 851 were wounded — and served as an elaborate training scenario Tuesday morning aimed at teaching scores of law enforcement officers from around the San Gabriel Valley, along with emergency room staff members at Pomona Valley Hospital at the Fairground in Pomona.
SWAT, fire and paramedics from Pomona, West Covina, Covina, Glendora and other nearby cities participated in the special training that mimicked the events of the Route 91 Harvest music festival last October, when a gunman opened fire, killing 58 people and wounding hundreds, many of them from Southern California. (Read More)
Moulage Concepts supports Truman Medical Centers Residency Training Event
The Importance of Accuracy in Moulage Training
Perhaps no name is more associated with moulage in EMS than Bobbie Merica's.
Merica’s career in the field catapulted after her 2011 book, Medical Moulage: How to Make Your Simulations Come Alive. The book provides detailed step-by-step instructions on creating moulage and how to effectively train medical providers on scenario development using realistic patient simulations. She’s also the owner of Moulage Concepts Inc., a premier provider of hospital, trauma, mass-casualty and prehospital moulage training, supply and certification.
Merica is certified in biological/chemical/terrorism moulage and WMD terrorism training. She designed and implemented the first in a series of 3D clinical wounds that can be triaged, sutured, debrided and drained, in addition to medical and trauma moulage kits and training courses specialized to the medical, military, veterinary and prehospital communities. She is an international speaker, works as a trauma moulage expert for state bodies around the country, is a contributing author at EMS World and is homeland security exercise and evaluation program-certified.
In this interview Merica discusses the necessity of implementing realistic moulage in medical training, particularly for first responders. ....(Read More)
Wisconsin EMS staff train for active shooters, IEDs
Improvised explosive device training for emergency responders
For the first time this year, the Wisconsin EMS Association's annual conference offered training on how to respond to a mass casualty event involving an improvised explosive device while it is still active and unfolding.
"The teams moved quickly, but carefully as their eyes scanned for possible explosives in darkened corridors.
Groups of firefighters, paramedics, emergency medical technicians and police officers shouted instructions and warnings to one another above the din of gunfire and the screams of the wounded in the blast zone.
Once the first team, known as a rescue task force, swept through — dodging suitcases, lunch boxes and other possibly hazardous objects scattered in an apparent explosion — and assessed the situation, other teams came in to evacuate the injured. They carried the wounded to a safe area to be treated for their injuries.
The chaotic scene was a drill, part of a daylong training about how to respond to an improvised explosive device blast, offered at the Wisconsin EMS Association's annual conference. The conference..."
Ridge woman re-creates wounds to train first responders
Paradise >> Bobbie Merica doesn’t call herself an artist. Despite owning hundreds of brushes and other tools that she uses to re-create injuries sustained by humans and animals, she considers herself a business woman in the very young category of moulage.
The company she founded, Moulage Concepts, is the national leader in the business of re-creating traumatic injuries for emergency response training.
Merica operates out of her home office in Paradise to travel around the country to hospitals, fire stations and military bases where she holds “train the trainer” workshops.
“I ask them ‘what’s your worst case scenario’,” Merica explains, “because everyone has one and knows what theirs is.”
OSU clinical instructor crafts simulated injuries, giving nursing students a more realistic look at trauma
Shauntae Yankasky sat on the floor, blood dripping from her right arm where two bones protruded from a horrific-looking wound.
With smoke filling the lobby of Newton Hall at Ohio State University, 14 other victims of a bus crash lay strewn with various injuries.
The scene wasn’t as serious as it seemed, though: It was staged this week as part of a “ mass-casualty” simulation designed to test the skills of students in the OSU School of Nursing.
About 70 seniors in the Nursing 501 course rotated among the victims to perform triage, with each group of five or so students spending 30 seconds assessing the seriousness of the injuries.
Merica’s “Medical Moulage” is THE Moulage Book
Bobbie Merica is a leading expert in the field of healthcare simulation moulage. As an accomplished simulation author, workshop educator and lab coordinator Bobbie is the definition of “simulation champion”. But now her latest work Medical Moulage: How to Make Your Simulations Come Alive has set the bar to a whole new level!
Imagine over 630 pages of moulage recipes ranging from stings to prolapsed cords with detailed instructions for ingredients, equipment, application techniques and even cleanup! Each recipe has several large and clear photos (over 1200 full-color in the book) which help demonstrate the steps involved and what the finished product should look like.
The clean layout and simple instructions make moulage recipes easy to understand and quick to follow. Not only does Bobbie cover the techniques necessary to craft the specific recipe in question but also helps us “set the stage” with other moulage tips that can help further ‘bridge the gap’ to simulator realism.
Moulage Concepts Featured in CBRNE Newsletter Issue 50, 2013
How good are you at pretending, at engaging and play acting? If you were instructed to care for a simulated victim with a patient profile card that read "hemorrhaging gunshot wound" or "open pneumothorax" could you see in your mind? Would your pulse instinctively quicken at the thought of congealed blood pooling around the victim or bloody froth at the chest wound entry point, bubbling with each exhalation? Working instinctively, would you begin putting pressure on imaginary wounds and shouting out orders, adrenaline building, propelling you into what you have been trained to do-save a life. If you had never experienced these two medical emergencies and I asked you to pretend in your scenario that your victim had them, could you do it?
Making Up Disaster BY TIMOTHY GOWER / PROTOMAG.COM
When Bobbie Merica worked in nursing schools setting up medical simulators—sophisticated computerized mannequins that can bleed, vomit and even talk back when asked questions—the students complained to Merica that something was missing. “They were dissuaded by the technology,” she says. “They said it didn’t feel real.”
Merica began studying wounds, burns and other physical signs of trauma and disease in medical texts and figuring out how to re-create them using theatrical makeup and other materials. Today, Merica is an expert in moulage; French for impression or cast, the term originally referred to wax models of the human body used by medical students to learn anatomy, and is now enjoying a renaissance in the form of makeup and prosthetics applied to mannequins and humans as teaching aids.
With her Moulage Concepts business in Paradise, Calif., Merica teaches educators how to make their simulators look more realistically injured or sick. She also teaches emergency-preparedness coordinators how to apply moulage and is frequently hired to make up volunteer victims at mock disasters.
‘Bridging the Gap’ in simulated training exercises
How good are you at pretending, at engaging and play-acting?If you were instructed to care for a simulated victim with a patient profile card that read “hemorrhaging gunshot wound” or “open pneumothorax” could you see it in your mind? Would your pulse instinctively quicken at the thought of congealed blood pooling around the victim or bloody froth at the chest wound entry point, bubbling with each exhalation? Working instinctively, would you begin putting pressure on imaginary wounds and shouting out orders, adrenaline building, propelling you into what you have been trained to do — save a life? If you had never experienced these two medical emergencies and I asked you to pretend in your scenario that your victim had them, could you do it?