AHA offers disaster readiness checklists
Educate both medical and non-clinical personnel
The Chicago-based American Hospital Association (AHA), which represents and serves approximately 5,000 hospitals, health care systems, networks, and other heath care providers, has compiled checklists for disaster planning as well as chemical and biological preparedness.
The association suggests a 13-point checklist for preparing your facility and staff for disaster readiness. This checklist affects all members of a facility’s staff, including non-clinical staff members such as security, human resources, information technology, and communications. Employees must be aware of the facility’s disaster plan and how it affects them and their role.
The checklist encourages facilities to:
- Focus efforts on creating a general "all- hazards" plan to provide an adaptable framework in a crisis situation.
- Upgrade disaster plans to include components for mass-casualty terrorism, including the potential of chemical and biological incidents.
- Contact your community’s emergency response agencies — rescue squad, police and fire departments. Make sure you have the latest contact numbers for key agencies and that, in turn, they have an up-to-date list of critical hospital contacts.
- Develop a plan to support and communicate with the families of staff members. The AHA suggests that staff members need assurances that their families are protected and cared for, especially when an incident involves chemical or biological exposure.
- Develop a simplified patient registration procedure in case of a large number of casualties. During the Sept. 11 attacks, hospitals in New York were inundated with patients almost all at once. Standard registration procedures were time-consuming and impractical.
Study use of couriers, two-way radios
- Review back-up communications capabilities. The AHA recommends paying special attention to Internet-based communication tools and even couriers. Makeshift couriers were used in New York after phone service was interrupted. Other options are two-way radios.
- Make sure essential hospital information systems and data storage have off-site storage and recovery capabilities.
- Prepare to talk to community leaders and lawmakers about how your hospital would deal with a mass-casualty event. The AHA says you also should be prepared to provide a special medical advisory to public officials who may be in contact with different media outlets.
- Review supply and inventory strategy. Rather than just-in-time supply schedules, make sure there are enough supplies available to care for unexpected patients. Though federal and state resources most likely would be available in a crisis situation, traditional transportation systems could be affected, AHA cautions.
- Prepare to protect the physical security of the hospital by limiting access to the facility.
- Make sure your facility is part of the National Disaster Medical System. Review who the contact is in your organization and who the federal coordinator is in your area. AHA also suggests that if your facility is located within an urban area, you should determine whether there is a Metropolitan Medical Response System plan in your community and how it works with your disaster plan.
- Ensure that staff report unexpected illness patterns to the public health department, and, if appropriate, to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
- Inventory your staff. In a national emergency, the government may call up armed forces reserves, and the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Emergency Preparedness may need to call up response teams. Find out what your polices are for job retention and benefit continuation and how activation will affect operations.
Checklist highlights strengths, weaknesses
The AHA also offers an extensive chemical and bioterrorism preparedness checklist. The checklist is a series of questions, to which you can answer "Yes," "No," or "Don’t Know," which prompts some action to be taken. The list covers Joint Commission inspections; communications and public affairs; supplies, pharmaceuticals, and equipment; hospital capacity; treatment procedures; facility management and security; and diagnostic capabilities. Other topics included in the overall checklist include facility management and security; psychiatric services and crisis counseling; and the diagnostic capabilities of the facility.
The largest section of the checklist involves training and personnel. This section includes questions on training staff for emergency preparedness and bioterrorism. The list breaks down who should be trained, from housekeeping staff and security to pastoral care and administrative staff. The list asks educators or those in charge of disaster planning to record the number of employees available in each department and the number that have been trained. It also prompts the user to categorize the different types of education currently available, both in-house and from outside vendors. Some of the staff training questions include:
- Does your facility/system have a method for assessing emergency preparedness training and continuing education needs based on the roles/responsibilities of staff members?
- Have all staff members received training on selection and use of appropriate personal protective equipment?
- Has the system/facility implemented activities to educate health care providers and laboratory workers on topics regarding specific procedures for handling biological and chemical incidents?
- Do training programs include a description of the civilian incident command system, i.e., familiarization with the procedures of external organizations involved in response actions?
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