Legal Affairs: Fourth Circuit upholds $237 million judgment against rural hospital, see page 3
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Leading Source for Healthcare Business News
Special Report: Emergency Preparedness
INSIDE
▼
Patients rehab faster and
safer with anti-gravity
treadmill
see page 13
INDEX
▼
Legal Affairs......................3
Financial Perspectives.......4
THA................................6
Integrative Medicine.........7
Hospital Headlines...........8
Physicians’ Forum.............9
Technology......................13
Moving On Up................14
Creating the new
generation of healers
see page 7
. . . . . . . . . . . .
August 2015 • Volume 12, Issue 5 • $3.50
When an emergency happens, don’t reinvent
the wheel: execute your plan
BY ROBIN DAVIS, MPA, CEM,
System Emergency Manager,
Memorial Hermann Health System
The call comes. There’s been an explosion
at a chemical plant in Pasadena with mass
casualties. You do not know how many; you
do not know how badly they are injured;
all you know is they are on the way to the
hospital. Or, a man walks into the ER
suffering with a severe headache, muscle
aches, fatigue, and diarrhea. And, oh, by the
way, he also reveals that he’s just returned
from West Africa. Ebola, you think. What
to do?
As an emergency manager at a Houston
hospital the aforementioned scenarios
are not only entirely possible, they are
quantifiably probable.
For a frontline
hospital worker initially confronted with a
mass casualty or Ebola scenario, it is natural
for fear, nerves, and panic to manifest.
What you do not want is inertia. Now is
the time for action, not indecisiveness and
inaction. The clock is ticking. You have a
plan. Execute it. Lives are at stake.
The Joint Commission’s Emergency
Management Standards requires that all
hospitals, no matter how large or small, have
an Emergency Operations Plan (EOP) that
describes how it will respond to and recover
from all hazards – including an expected
explosion at a chemical plant or a suspected
Ebola case walking through the door.
Those plans should include six critical
elements:
• Communications
• Resources and assets
• Safety and security
• Staff responsibilities
• Utilities and clinical
• Support activities
The reasoning behind the “all hazards”
approach is it allows hospitals the ability to
tailor Emergency Management Plans (EMP)
and respond to a range of emergencies
varying in scale, duration, and cause. A
well thought out EOP provides the structure
and processes that an organization utilizes
to respond to and initially recover from an
event and addresses key elements as:
• Response procedures
• Capabilities and procedures when the
hospital cannot be supported by the
community
• Recovery strategies
• Initiating and terminating response
and recovery phases
• Activating authority
• Identifying alternate sites for care,
treatment and services
A successful and comprehensive EOP should
instill not only preparedness, but confidence
that the hospital and staff will be ready to
execute the plan. Disaster exercises offer an
opportunity to bring leadership, staff, and
physicians together to work as a team in
addressing all aspects of the emergency and
the appropriate response.
Founder of the Boy Scouts, Robert BadenPowell once said:
“Be Prepared... the meaning of the motto
is that a scout must prepare himself by
previous thinking out and practicing how
to act on any accident or emergency so that
he is never taken by surprise.”
In other words, practice builds preparedness
and confidence. That is why it is important
that hospitals conduct exercises of their
EOP with the goal of evaluating processes
and to identify opportunities to improve
and educate. Exercises – practice – must be
taken seriously, and if possible, conducted
like the hospital staff is dealing with the real
thing. Not taking the emergency planning
exercises seriously only breeds fear, panic,
and inertia in a real event.
Exercises should be built on the crawl-walkrun mentality, meaning start small, engage
multiple teams and build and improve the
process based upon lessons learned. Fullscale exercises should stress the players.
Please see EMERGENCY page 17
PRSRT STD
US POSTAGE
PAID
HOUSTON TX
PERMIT NO 13187