A FAKE disaster will be staged to test medics’ response to an atrocity.

A ‘mass casualty’ exercise for the whole of Greater Manchester will take place in the autumn to prepare NHS staff for an incident in which many people are severely injured.

Details of the latest casualty drill emerged as Linh Nghiem, Resilience Manager for the NHS, briefed health bosses in Oldham.

It comes two years after GMP staged a major counter-terrorism training exercise – involving 800 volunteers – in which ‘terrorists’ carried out a fake gun and bomb attack on the Trafford Centre.

The new live drill, which will take place on September 18, has been named Exercise Socrates 2 – and will rehearse the region’s hospitals and emergency services for a situation where patients need everything from burns treatment to psychological support.

The UK’s security service, MI5, state that the current threat level for international terrorism in the UK is ‘severe’, meaning an attack is highly likely.

The first ‘Exercise Socrates’ took place just three weeks before the attack on the Manchester Arena on May 22 last year.

The scenario for that exercise had been a staged simultaneous suicide bombing and 'marauding terrorist’ firearm attack at Manchester Airport, resulting in 187 adult and child casualties.

Less than a month later, the explosion at the Ariana Grande concert left 22 people dead and hundreds injured.

That incident saw the first ‘live activation’ of the Greater Manchester NHS Partnership ‘Mass Casualty Plan’, according to the Kerslake Report.

And fresh memories of the Socrates exercise meant that tactics and strategy worked well on the night of the real attack, the report stated.

In a report to Oldham’s Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), Linh Nghiem said: “The exercise will run for a full day.

“The overall purpose of the exercise is to ensure lessons identified from the previous exercise and the Manchester Arena incident have been learned.

“The exercise will test different areas of the GM Mass Casualty Plan such as the procedures for managing burns, patient tracking, self-presenters’ psychological support and accelerated discharge procedures.”

It follows on from ‘Exercise Ferranti’, which took place in Oldham last September to explore and understand the impacts of a total power outage in the borough and how it would affect hospital patients and treatments.

Health bodies across the region have also been assessing their ‘Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response’ (EPRR) arrangements, through which they can review their ability to cope with emergency situations and incidents.

All NHS organisations in Greater Manchester are measuring themselves against the national EPRR framework, and conducting a ‘deep dive’ investigation into their own organisations.

This has prompted one organisation to review its ‘decontamination and lock-down’ procedures.

Pennine Care Foundation Trust, which provides community and mental health support services to people across Oldham and other GM boroughs, reported ‘substantial compliance’ overall but found it had four ‘amber ratings’ where it needed to improve.

The amber ratings were related to the lock-down policy for the trust, its decontamination risk assessment and needing to hold appropriate equipment for decontaminating patients.

It will now seek to meet all the emergency NHS guidelines by October this year.