Community tests emergency preparedness
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| Registered nurse Dawn Davies wore white coveralls, gloves and a mask to minimize her risk as she gave the initial examination of students during the safety drill. |
It was only a drill to test Community’s emergency preparedness, but staff treated it like the real deal.
Medical staff readied to spray the chemicals off patients within a parking lot tent and to triage them outside the emergency department so that other patients and staff wouldn’t be exposed. Communications staff manned command centers to get information out quickly to families and the media. And security protectively turned away pretend reporters and wore gloves in case they had to direct potentially contaminated patients.
“We’ve got a potential 70 out there and coming in by ambulance or car and we don’t know which entrance,” said Garth Wade, emergency department manager at Community Regional Medical Center. “Our goal is to deploy people around the perimeter and catch them coming in. Because of the scenario we know they’re contaminated and they’re supposed to go through the decon tent.”
Fresno and Clovis students from the Center for Advanced Research & Technology’s (CART) biomedical classes acted as the affected patients. The high school students wore tags listing symptoms ranging from skin rashes and eye irritation to difficulty breathing, dizziness, headaches and nausea and stomach cramps. Some students acted the part convincingly by moaning and holding their stomachs or pretending to be anxious and combative with nurses.
Registered nurse Amy Campbell, Community Regional’s incident commander for the emergency department, carried a clipboard with the manufacturer’s warnings on the insecticide, checking to make sure nurses were prepared for whatever they could encounter.
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| Students from the Center for Advanced Research & Technology (CART) volunteered in the safety drill. |
“We don’t know how many are coming, so we’re starting with just me,” she said. “The idea is to go minimal until we have to add more nurses. We don’t want to deplete the hospital staff.”
Community Regional never got to a full-blown Team Delta because many of the drill’s patients were sent to other hospitals in the region. With the largest emergency department in central California and staffing equipment for Level 1 trauma, Community Regional would’ve hardly noticed an influx of 30 or so to the emergency room, nurses explained.
At Clovis Community Medical Center, incident commander Jeff Zweifel and the Clovis team swiftly organized to assess hospital needs and set teams in motion to handle the incoming patients.
When five patients arrived outside the hospital, all were “caught” and directed to the ER Team Delta tent where they were decontaminated, treated and told they would be released to family members. When family members arrived at different areas of the hospital, they were directed by volunteer services manager Paulla Sebra and her volunteers to the Oak Room as designated earlier in the drill. The family members were briefed and reunited with their children in a timely fashion.
Home Health Services at Community Health Center-Sierra also participated in the drill, receiving 15 early-discharged patients from Clovis Community and Community Regional to free up beds for possible admits at those facilities.
While the drill was effective and efficient, staff members sought to enhance the drill’s success by presenting scenarios and solutions to improve future efforts before calling the drill to its end around 10:30 a.m.
Erin Kennedy and Mary Lisa Russell reported this story. They can be reached at ekennedy@communitymedical.org or mrussell@communitymedical.org.