Cumberland and Fentress County first responders receiving specialized hands-on burn care training from experts at Vanderbilt.
Chester Goad is President of the Serve Strong Corbin Scott Goad Memorial Foundation. Goad said he and his wife founded the organization after his son Corbin Goad, a former Cumberland County Sheriff’s Department employee, died in an off-duty vehicle crash in 2022 while traveling through Fentress County.
“While this is obviously a horrible tragedy for our family, they deal with these types of things on a regular basis,” Goad said. “So we want to give back to them and provide them with anything that we can that might be helpful to help them in their service to their communities.”
Goad said the foundation partnered with Vanderbilt specialists, bringing three burn surgeons and a coordinator to the region to lead an eight-hour Advanced Burn Life Support (ABLS) course. He said the training included classroom instruction, case studies, hands-on simulations with mannequins, and final written and practical assessments.
“It’s designed to provide like a how-to of emergency care for burn patients through that first critical period,” Goad said. “There was definitely a lot of information to be shared, but they also had hands-on experience.”
He said the training covered a wide range of burn injuries, from house fires to common household accidents such as stove or grill-related burns, as well as differences in burn severity across age groups.
“You’re not ever expecting these things to happen, but when they do, you want to be prepared,” Goad said.
Goad said the idea for the training came directly from feedback collected from first responders in the region. Goad said the foundation has an online live survey that any first responder can take. Goad said most of the first responders who take the survey are from the Upper Cumberland.
“We keep that survey going because we want to be mindful of what it is that first responders actually need, desire, and want to be able to do their jobs,” Goad said. “And so part of that list, it includes everything. Well, number one on the list is mental health and wellness. And then there’s, of course, you know, station supplies and things like that. But number three on that list is training and education, and educational resources. And so they have started expressing to us the types of resources that they need.”
He said the goal is to remove financial and logistical barriers to specialized training that many agencies want but cannot always access. Goad said the advanced burn training took place on Tuesday and went exceptionally well.
Goad hopes to provide similar training opportunities to other first-responder agencies in the Upper Cumberland. First responders can fill out the foundation’s survey online at www.servestrong.us.