At St. Rita’s Medical Center, incident commander Katie Hunt stood before a room of hospital employees telling them the morgue was overflowing with bodies.
Some had to be sent to funeral homes immediately to meet religious needs of burying the dead the same day they died. Others could be taken to a morgue the county set up for the influx of bodies.
It was the same deal at Lima Memorial Health System. There were no actual dead bodies, only an exercise hospitals, emergency responders, health departments and coroners in northwestern Ohio were conducting Wednesday as part of an emergency preparedness exercise to make sure hospitals are prepared for a mass casualty response.
This scenario, hospital officials were told there was a deadly breakout of the flu. There were hundreds of deaths, 66 at St. Rita’s over the three weeks the exercise was set up to simulate in one day, said Chief Jeff Ramey who heads the police department and the emergency management program at St. Rita’s.
Lima Memorial had 82 deaths.
“We’re trying to create as much reality as we can without totally disrupting the operations of the facility,” Ramey said. “This is the first time we have really tested our mass fatality plan. We want to see what is good about them and what needs work.”
By early morning, everything at St. Rita’s was going well with a few problems staff was working through.
Lima Memorial Director of Emergency Management Steve Mericle said the drill went well but the hospital staff also gained important information on areas they need to improve.
Communications is one of the key issues, not just inside a big hospital but with everyone on the outside at all hospitals to ensure they can handle the patients coming in. As an example, Mericle said the hospital only has so many ventilators. If all ventilators are in use, paramedics need to know that ahead of time so the patients are taken to a hospital that has available ventilators.
Staff stayed in constant communications paying close attention to the number of patients being treated and where the patients were being treated inside the hospital, Mericle said.
Communications ranged from cellphones and email to staff walking around.
“We had runners going floor to floor,” he said.
While pandemics are less common today, Ramey said less than 100 years ago the Spanish flu killed a lot of people.
Officials were throwing in what Ramey called “speed bumps” along the way, such as requiring staff to meet the religious needs of the dead whose religion requires same day burial.
The drill tested emergency room staff with simulated patients. Staff members were handed paperwork, each sheet containing information on a sick person. They had to treat it as if they were dealing with real patients, determine the test to conduct and order blood work, Ramey said.
They also called staff at home who were off work to ask if they could come in. None were required to come in but the calls were made to determine how many would be available, Ramey said.
At Lima Memorial, 10 percent to 15 percent of the staff was unable to work in the exercise because they were either sick or caring for sick family members. That would happen in real life so officials wanted to make it part of the exercise, Mericle said.
Staff from front-line workers up to the executive staff participated in the exercise, Ramey said.
All the players met later in the day to discuss the entire exercise including what worked and what did not. The exercise gives them a chance to get things right in case a real event hits.
Thursday 10 April 2014
http://www.limaohio.com/news/news/926931/Local-hospitals-hold-mass-casualty-exercise
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