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One hospital's tornado story: How drill prep saved lives

Emergency Management Alert, February 12, 2008

Last week's devastating tornadoes reminded us of the story of a hospital in Georgia whose homegrown emergency plan saved employees from great harm. As reported in HCPro's newsletter Briefings on Hospital Safety, the staff of Sumter Regional Hospital in Americus, GA, had to put that plan in place when a tornado hit the facility March 1, 2007.

All of the patients and employees survived, said Susie Fussell, the hospital's vice president of nursing, who also was in charge of risk management.

Everyone involved remained remarkably calm and orderly during the evacuation of the hospital, including patients' families, who stayed in their places and waited for instructions despite the chaos and severe building damage.

"I don't want to imply it was smooth sailing from the beginning," Fussell says. "But understand, there were no [government] rules to go by--there was not a template for state response.

Fussell credited emergency management drills for

 teaching everyone their roles
 employing critical-thinking "disaster logic" that gave them the confidence to figure out the unscripted details of their response as events unfolded

More about disaster response can be found at HCPro's Hospital Safety Center Web site, www.hospitalsafetycenter.com.

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