In disaster planning, imagination is critical
In disaster planning, imagination is critical
Brainstorming scenarios can help
As Joe Cappiello, BSN, MA, vice president of accreditation field operations for the Joint Commission, indicated in this month’s cover story, the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans was really a "perfect storm" of four separate disasters. It was a confluence of events that few had foreseen, and that’s all the more reason, say the experts, to let your imagination run wild when planning for disasters, experts say.
"The biggest thing is that people need to sit and talk and have a kind of twisted imagination," says Mary Frost, RN, trauma coordinator at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston. That’s exactly what the city’s health care community did in the wake of Hurricane Allison in 2001, creating Houston’s Regional Unified Medical Command Center. The result? After Katrina hit New Orleans, Houston was deluged with about 25,000 addition hospital patients, yet almost all of the city’s hospitals were kept off diversion.
"Things that seemed were the questions to ask turned out not to be; this is bigger than anything anyone else has ever seen," says William (Kip) Schumacher, MD, CEO and founder of The Schumacher Group, a Lafayette, LA-based practice management firm that provides emergency medicine, staffing, and practice management services to 104 facilities, including 30 in Louisiana, and which was heavily involved in the Katrina response process.
"It was so catastrophic, so big, that every time I thought we had a grasp on the situation I realized everything we had done was so far under what could have been done," he says.
The "rules," he adds, changed totally. "They were talking about evacuating hospitals with pickup trucks, because air evacuation had difficult access," he recalls. "We had hospitals evacuated by boats that our docs were pushing and paddling."
In preparing for the unexpected, says Randy Pilgrim, MD, president and chief medical officer of The Schumacher Group, "do a number of scenarios that you can play out prior to an event, so you can understand how key decisions might be made. Know who to contact, how to get hold of them if normal communications do not work. Think of who needs to have a satellite phone now, while the storm is still coming."
Those scenarios could include evacuation of patients ahead of the storm, he says. "It may be advisable, but you have to acknowledge that there is tremendous risk in making that decision," he warns.
"It’s very difficult to understand what magnitude of deficit will hit you once the storm hits," Pilgrim continues. "What is key is to prepare yourself ahead of time by orderly examination of what may happen when it hits."
Need More Information?
For more information, contact:
- Mary Frost, RN, Trauma Coordinator, Texas Children’s Hospital, 6621 Fannin St., Houston, TX 77030. Phone: (832) 824-1000.
- William (Kip) Schumacher, MD, CEO, The Schumacher Group, 200 Corporate Blvd., Suite 201, Lafayette, LA 70508. Phone: (800) 893-9698.
Subscribe Now for Access
You have reached your article limit for the month. We hope you found our articles both enjoyable and insightful. For information on new subscriptions, product trials, alternative billing arrangements or group and site discounts please call 800-688-2421. We look forward to having you as a long-term member of the Relias Media community.