ELMIRA, N.Y. (WENY) --The Elmira College Nursing Program is teaching students that preparedness is a key skill to have in the healthcare field. Especially during a public health emergency.

For nursing students, books and lectures are only one part of their education. Like many healthcare professionals, it takes hands-on experience to learn how to help during an emergency. To do so, the college was host to a drill that simulated a meningitis outbreak on Wednesday afternoon.

The college's nursing faculty and office of communications and marketing collaborated with Steuben County Public Health and Chemung County to organize the public health emergency response exercise.

"Going into the future, infectious diseases like meningitis and measles, which we're seeing in the news, are going to become more prevalent, so these kind of exercises are more important now than they ever have been," said Debby Woglum, a member of the nursing faculty at Elmira College.

Volunteers from the ARC of Chemung-Schuyler and the Alliance for Empowerment/Able 2 and Capabilities joined drama students from Notre Dame High School, students from Elmira College, and the Elmira College President Dr. Charles Lindsey and his wife Janna Lindsay to serve as role players in the drill, also known as patients.

The pretend patients first met the student nurses at the greeting and triage station to address their potential symptoms. Then, they went to registration to find out what medications they needed. From there, they went to the dispensing table to get medication and speak with an educator to understand what they were taking. Medical evaluators were also present for those that had issues with their medication.

Some students say it was stressful, however, they feel it was an overall useful experience.

"It helps out greatly," said Jamie Wagner, one of the student nurses at Elmira College. "It not only gives you like the communication that you need to talk to patients because you're talking to the community, you're talking to the public, but it also gives you different areas to think on and prepares you for whether you're doing floor nursing or you're on the community working with patients."

Students arrived in the morning and had free reign to set up as they saw fit. In the middle of the drill, faculty gave them a chance to voice their concerns and change what they felt was not working out with the drill.

Overall, Woglum says the exercise is meant to help students realize how difficult and intricate public health response is and show them the importance of preparedness in the field.

Elmira College faculty says they want to be clear that the drill is purely simulation and there are no known cases of meningitis on campus.