top of page
Writer's pictureBrian Payne

A Hazardous Materials Accident Threatens You, Your Staff, and your Patients

Imagine that you’re at work, and your phone receives a push alert from the local news station stating there has been a train (see below for other possible transportation methods) derailment in your city. While staff continues to work through their day-to-day tasks, you start to consider how this may impact you and your team.


As you contemplate if this will impact your facility/agency, ALL the cell phones are activated through the Wireless Emergency Alerts (examples would be an Amber Alert or Tornado Warning). The message states:


“If you are receiving this message, you need to seek immediate shelter, and once indoors, you will need to shelter in place until further notice. Due to a hazardous materials spill, persons who venture outside may become severely ill or go into respiratory failure causing death. You will be notified when it’s safe to go outside, and we encourage you to monitor broadcast media for ongoing updates.”


While the information listed above is fiction, healthcare workers take on a significant burden by serving the medical needs of others. No matter their location or medical facility/agency type, all healthcare workers are impacted by this scenario. The varying possibilities that could affect your facilities or agencies in a scenario like this are almost endless.


When you’re advised to shelter in place, do you, your staff, or your patients under home care understand what that means? Do you have on-site facility staff or family to help you secure the building/home?


What do you do if someone walks in from the street to seek shelter? What if 15 minutes go by, and someone tries to enter your facility? Do they get let inside? If so, do they need decontamination? What if they become ill once inside?


What happens if this lasts all day? What operational changes would be needed if this were to last two days? Do you have enough food? How do you contact your staff outside the area to ensure they don’t come into work? Do you call anyone else to obtain information? Will you need to get any additional resources for your agency? What happens if you have a medical emergency unrelated to this hazardous material situation? Do you know if an ambulance can respond to your location?


Is your healthcare agency ready to shelter in place?


While you feel like your team is ready for anything, it’s important to remember to test those plans, policies, procedures, etc., to ensure what’s on paper works. If you find through an exercise that it doesn’t work, you identify why it didn’t and how you can fix this gap. You may receive an injected situation through an activity you’ve never considered. What an excellent opportunity to prepare collaboratively. This is HOW you can keep yourself, your staff, your patients, and their families safer.


Additionally, it’s important to remember that hazardous material incidents can be more than just a train derailment. Chemicals travel up and down our roads every day, all day. This includes within our cities, on the rivers, and in the sky. Maybe this incident is caused by a terrorist attack through a chemical weapon or a balloon floating throughout the sky.


For several communities, hazardous materials incidents rank as one of the highest manmade events likely to occur and could be one of the most impactful events in the community. This information is documented in their community-wide hazardous vulnerability assessments (HVA). Some locations or agencies may call this their Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment (THIRA).


Do your BEST. Prepare for the WORST.


The Torchlight Preparedness team isn’t just here to make a living; we are here to impact the living. For that reason, our community-wide exercises are open to all medical facilities. Examples include long-term care, assisted living, nursing homes, doctor offices, ambulatory surgery centers, hospice houses, home health, critical access hospitals, hospitals, rehabilitation facilities, end-stage renal disease (or dialysis centers), and more.


If your agency falls under the CMS ruling, where they’ve placed your facility into one of the 17 medical facility types, then this disaster exercise is for your team. This functional or full-scale exercise will separate the medical facilities into inpatient, outpatient, and home health categories. This separation by the categories listed above will allow our team to support your exercise experience to ensure that the most appropriate information is injected throughout this disaster exercise.


For additional information, please click here to select the proper exercise for your agency or facility. Until then, Benjamin Franklin said it very well, “by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

 

Hit our buy now easy button to schedule your community-wide exercise today.


This Exercise will Potentially Exercise Components of the Following Community Lifelines:

  • Security and Safety

  • Communications

  • Health and Medical

  • Transportation


15 views0 comments

Comments


bottom of page