Tip of the week: Communication methods during an emergency go beyond satellite phones and text messaging
Hospital Safety Insider, February 25, 2009
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You often hear about the need to have redundant communication strategies for a community catastrophe, with the idea that regular and cell phone service may go down quickly. It’s important to think broadly in this regard and not trap yourself in a mindset of limited options.
See how many of these methods your emergency operations plan includes for backup communication:
- Basic telephone systems
- In-building wireless phone systems
- Overhead announcement and paging systems
- Nurse call system
- Voice over Internet Protocol systems
- Cell phones
- Beepers and pocket pagers
- Enterprise systems
- BlackBerries and similar devices
- Text messaging
- Text-to-voice translation
- Communication systems for the deaf and hearing impaired
- Telephonic translation lines and services
- Access control systems
- Fax machines
- Hospital television network systems
- Mass notification systems
- Hospital electronic bulletin boards
- Intranet message posting
- Bed-tracking and facility status reporting systems
- Electronic health record systems
- Enterprise systems for networked hospitals
- Resource and grant-asset tracking systems
- Evacuee and disaster patient tracking systems
- Emergency medical services communication systems
- Emergency desktop and mobile handheld programmed radios
- Communication with emergency operations centers
- Public health monitoring and notification systems (syndromic surveillance systems, threat notification systems, outbreak management systems)
- Satellite radio and communication systems
- Ham radio systems
- Human runners (the low-tech communication system if all else fails)
This tip comes from HCPro’s book, Emergency Management Coordinator’s Handbook for Hospitals.
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