Hospital disaster planning is carried according to the following 4 steps: research, plan development, plan promulgation, and plan distribution. We are going to give a full description of each step of the planning process. The step of research emphasizes the gathering, organizing, and organizing of information dealing with the characteristics of the hospitals in the region which need to be considered in the planning process. The planning has to include the following areas: communications, medical operations, security, pharmacy, infection control, patient tracking and transportation.
It is also necessary to identify existing resources, which include both personnel and equipment, that are available for meeting emergency requirements. The existing planning documents need to be reviewed in order to determine whether those documents can be modified for the planning. If the existing plans turn out accurate and realistic, they can be applied in the planning process but it’s very important to make sure all the information in them is updated according to the present day realities.
If existing plans don’t offer a full overview which is needed at present, and contain mistakes, they should be reviewed but they can’t serve as a basis for the present planning. The step of plan development is the most complicated in the process and it requires focusing on the following issues: organization, methodology, planning requirements, and plan preparation. The preferred planning organization is considered a hospital planning group. The lead planning entity assumes the role of the team leader.
This approach helps to make a complex plan without any duplications. The lead entity has to make sure that a warm atmosphere is created so that the most efficient planning is achieved. It’s impossible to offer a single methodology for the hospital disaster planning, that is why only the main guidelines can be advised here. In order to develop an efficient plan, it’s important to make sure that a comprehensive list of tasks is created and factors that would adversely effect a response identified. It also has to be determined who is in charge of planning.
The overall set of resources for the case of emergency, as well as the entities which will carry out various tasks that must be performed, needs to be identified. The team also needs to formulate a realistic concept of operations for the emergency response, as well as identify all the information which is needed by responders and local officials for preplanning. If methodology is mostly carried out by the planning team, so it can be different for every hospital, all the main requirements for hospital disaster planning are the same for every hospital, therefore they need to be carefully studied.
Planning requirements include Emergency planning guidelines from the Division of Emergency Management and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Plan preparation process goes in the following steps: 1. Preparing the initial draft of the plan. 2. The hospital planning group is supposed to review the initial draft version of the plan and produce a working draft which will include all the realistic issues that were agreed upon by the planning team. 3. After the completing of the working draft, a review draft is provided. 4. The preparation of the final draft.
The plan promulgation step includes reviewing of the planning documents through the approval process which is defined for the region. Plan distribution stands for the distribution of the plan to all the receivers who need to obtain its copy. Even though after completing the final version of the disaster response plan the work on the plan is finished, plan maintenance has to be provided in order to provide maximum effectiveness of the planning. Plan maintenance usually includes the following issues: making sure the document is reviews annually and updated at least every 5 years for revision or change.
The reviewing ought to be done by the hospital planning group and there also needs to be a process for distribution of revisions or changes. Updates need to be included into the plan in such situations, as when hazard consequences change, warning and communication systems are upgraded, additional emergency resources are obtained, state planning standards for the documents are revised, the concept of operations for emergencies changes, or in other situations similar to the ones mentioned above.
The most important methods of updating planning documents include plan revision and plan change. Revision of the plan is necessary in such a case when numerous pages of the document needs to have some changes and updates made in them, or when the existing document was prepared before some new word processing program was introduced. A change to the disaster planning document includes updating some parts of the document and changing some limited number of pages.
It’s important to mark that if changes are made into the document, it doesn’t alter the original documents date and thus no new signatures need to be obtained for the document to remain valid. In order to find out whether the plan can be applied in the emergency circumstances, it’s very important to provide its testing. Testing also helps to identify problem areas and evaluate the preparedness of the hospital for the disaster.
Drills and emergency management exercises have to include some sort of post-exercise critique in order to help determine the weak sides of the plan. There are 5 types of exercise which can be used in such a case: orientation seminar, drill, tabletop exercise, functional exercise, and full-scale exercise. The main test of the plan goes when the hospital faces the actual disaster, and a formal post incident review has to be conducted in order to find out all the main weaknesses of the plan and make changes in order to respond to the next disaster more efficiently.
It’s important to emphasize that disaster planning is a regional effort because it provides help for a defined community and thus all regional efforts have to be taken in order to provide all the necessary help is the disaster occurs. Every particular hospital is unable to provide all the necessary resources in case of the disaster due its limited resources, therefore it’s very important to provide all the disaster planning on the regional basis, and making sure that all the consequences of the disaster will be covered if it occurs.
All the personnel involved in the development of the plan needs to get all the highly-qualified training in order to provide all the required skills when it becomes necessary. All the plans which hospitals carry out need to be simple and based on the normal daily operations in order to provide maximum efficiency.
Bibliography.
1. Aghababian RV: Hospital disaster planning. Top Emerg Med 1986 Jan; 7(4): 46-54 2. Jerry L. Mothershead. Disaster Planning. Mar 2003. 3. Waeckerle JF: Disaster planning and response. N Engl J Med 1991 Mar 21; 324(12): 815-21