About Stevens
Disaster Planning & Prep
Stevens Hospital’s Emergency Management Committee meets to use the Hazard Vulnerabilities Assessment (HVA) completed each year to develop the strategy for disaster planning in conjunction with the Region One Healthcare Coalition to work on better preparing all of our healthcare community in the event of a natural or human-caused disaster.
The Emergency Management Committee creates policies, and procedures for this response using the following four aspects of Emergency Management:
- Preparedness—planning, establishing procedures and preparing the facility for any emergency situation.
- Mitigation—identifying hazards or risks for emergency situations or disasters in the hospital and region and doing what can be done to reduce the risk for damage by these hazards.
- Response—planning and testing the hospital's disaster response at least twice a year utilizing a potentially high-risk scenario to test the emergency response plans.
- Recovery—planning how the hospital would recover from a disaster situation and continue to serve the community while going through the event.
In order to better respond in an emergency or disaster situation that might involve the influx of a large number of casualties, Stevens Hospital would initiate Hospital Incident Command structure, set up its own Emergency Command Center or work within a Unified Command to manage the activities of the staff and local and regional partners. This may include many of the following emergency responsibility centers or services:
- Decontamination Response Team (DRT): In the event of chemical or biological exposure or other hazardous material exposure, portable decontamination systems have been supplied to Stevens by federal grants and staffed with individuals who have received special training in site management, decontamination procedures, system usage. Those exposed to any hazardous materials will be routed to this area for decontamination prior to entering the hospital.
- Emergency Control Center: The overall direction of facilities operations in the disaster would be managed through this center and the administrative-designated commander. Management of communications, key internal resources, information regarding surge capacity, personnel and medical staff resources, occupancy of buildings and other key resource decisions would be under this center.
- Patient triage station: The emergency department and the admitting department would triage, register and maintain tracking information on patients.
- Labor pool: Staff reports to the announced location of this pool in order to act as runners, helpers, and transporters of resources, information and communication as needed by the direction of incident command.
- Media control center: The public information officer would establish a location and be in continuous communication with incident command and patient triage center in order to provide accurate information about the emergency, patients/casualties to the media.
- Visitor control center: Set-up in a designated location, usually in the Café or outside the emergency department. Social services will provide a space for visitors and family to congregate away from patient care areas and to provide updates to families and significant others. Chaplains will be available also.
The Hospital will make every effort to direct people to the most appropriate resource to handle their needs, whether that be the visitor control center, another medical clinic, or simply staying home and staying tuned to the appropriate information channel on their television or radio. You may also check this website to get updates on the hospital status and location of the visitor and media control centers in the event of a disaster.
For more information, contact Mark Nunes at mnunes@stevenshospital.org.
