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Emergency Drill Weeks Earlier Helped Prepare Hospitals  

Northwest Arkansas hospitals saw a major test of disaster preparedness plans June 27 when a chlorine leak at a Tyson chicken plant required emergency care for 170 workers.

Mercy Medical Center received the most patients at 59. Northwest-Springdale, Northwest-Bentonville, Washington Regional and Siloam Springs Memorial each received an additional 25-30 patients.

Chuck Trudo, RN, hospital preparedness coordinator for Mercy Medical Center, said a regional disaster drill two and a half weeks before the chlorine leak really helped in preparing for the real thing.

“This is why the disaster drills are so important,” Trudo said. “The drill gave our staff a great refresher course on the equipment and procedures necessary to decontaminate patients quickly and efficiently. We were prepared to handle the large number of patients who came our way.”

The drill focused specifically on the hospital’s decontamination plan, which involved setting up the decontamination unit outside of the emergency department and running mock patients through it. Trudo said the drill gave the 15 Mercy employees who are part of the hospital’s decontamination team valuable experience they were able to use during the real incident.

The biggest challenge in getting that many patients at one time is staffing. The hospital is not normally staffed for a large influx of patients at one time, so the first thing to be done was to get additional staff to the hospital. In this case, Mercy was able to get six additional physicians and 14 additional nurses and two techs to come in for the emergency.

Trudo said space was also a consideration. It was necessary to move people and utilize areas of the hospital that aren’t normally used for patient care.

Of the 59 patients brought to Mercy, 28 were hospitalized. The need for hospitalization also strains the capacity.

“When something like this happens, the hospital could be full or close to full,” Trudo said. “When you go into a mode like this, the state has a bed system to let you know what hospitals have beds available. That is usually updated daily, but in a disaster mode it can be updated every 30 minutes to an hour as the situation changes.”

Mercy Medical Center COO Michele Stewart said she was very proud of how the hospital personnel responded to this disaster.

“We were able to respond to the needs of a lot of patients in a short period of time,” she said.

Tags:

chlorine leak, Chuck Trudo, hospital disaster emergency plans, Mercy Medical Center

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