Medical Journal Houston

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