Community participates in safety drill

Community's vice president of academic affairs Bruce Kinder (left) and emergency department manager Garth Wade (right) go over safety drill details with corporate safety manager Lonnie Carter.

Community Medical Centers staff was busy before the sun came up Oct. 25, as employees responded to a statewide hazard drill.

At Community Regional Medical Center in downtown Fresno, a variety of department managers, directors and administrators met as early as 5 a.m. in a first-floor command center to act on a mock scenario of Code Triage from avian flu outbreak. The exercise ended about 10 a.m., with staff debriefing thereafter.

Meanwhile, staff at Clovis Community Medical Center and Fresno Heart & Surgical Hospital had their own command centers running and coordinating with the other Community facilities to figure out how to best pool resources.

“For every drill you develop a set of objectives, and then beyond that you develop measureables that you can quantify how successful or unsuccessful your response was to that scenario,” said Lonnie Carter, Community’s corporate safety manager.

Hospitals such as Community’s run such exercises twice a year, with at least one of those exercises requiring coordination with other health care providers in the area (as this most recent one did).

The drill called for Fresno County to respond as if 200 to 250 patients would need medical attention during the first week of the mock outbreak. Carter said Community facilities were to prepare to receive 38% of those patients.

This was the first major safety drill since acute-care services from University Medical Center moved to Community Regional in April.

“It gave us an opportunity to see what the master system is like under one roof,” Carter said. “We had a lot of new faces together at the table for the first time.”

Staff in the command center used white boards to write down critical tasks to take care of, and had different directors and managers report how many beds were available in their specific units and whether they had adequate staffing to handle the extra patients.

“Overall, I think it went well,” Carter said. “We had an opportunity to test our system against a really tough scenario.”

This story was reported by Eddie Hughes. He can be reached at eddieh@communitymedical.org.

Friday, October 26, 2007