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Evacuation drills: Transporting obese patients

Emergency Management Alert, April 24, 2006

Evacuation drills: Transporting obese patients

Adapted from HCPro's April 2005 issue of the newsletter Healthcare Life Safety Compliance:

How would you transport an obese patient during a hospital evacuation? You might follow the method used by a Houston-based hospital, which recently needed to move its cardiac patients from the fifth floor to the outdoors because floods had left the building with no regular or emergency power. One patient was a 300-lb man who required four staff to move him on a stretcher down several flights of stairs while an additional clinician, who used a breathing bag, straddled the patient.

Was that the best way to transport him? According to some life safety experts, using stretchers or performing blanket-drag techniques may be staff's only choices if a fire or other emergency requires a full building evacuation.

For this reason, healthcare workers are encouraged to make this part of their training drills. Though it's tough to conduct drills that involve stairway evacuations or blanket drags (in part because of the need to find volunteers to act as patients), these scenarios occur often enough to warrant placement of such events in the evacuation drill.

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