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Imagine a busload of 50 people meeting a serious accident with serious and fatal injuries. The victims are rushed to a hospital’s emergency room one after the other. This could be straight out from a TV or movie scene. But what if it happens in real life?
Tawam Hospital, in affiliation with Johns Hopkins Medicine and part of the SEHA Healthcare System, holds unannounced disaster preparedness exercises, like the just-concluded drill held on 9 January 2014, to further train its emergency department and hospital staff to be prepared during extraordinary times.
In order to be prepared, various scenarios are created and tested throughout the year. With this drill our objectives were to test staff and organizational response to a large and sudden influx of patients at a time when the hospital was at near capacity with its daily operations. The drill was unannounced in order to create a real life situation.
In general, hospital emergency and support personnel need to know how to safely manage patients and additional casualties just like in the scenario. The drill was planned to test our step-by-step processes, which included activating the Capacity and Crisis Standard of Care protocol, maintaining current status of the department and inpatients, as well as patients for admission, all while providing for alternative care sites, and administering safe and appropriate patient care.
The crisis scenarios are also designed to test communications processes and general operations. Our Tawam teams are trained and tested on patient and family communication during the situation, communication with other hospital staff, and depending on each scenario, communication with other local officials, media, and partners, such as SEHA and Health Authority - Abu Dhabi (HAAD).
Mr. Ahmad Malalla, Manager of Risk & Safety Management at Tawam Hospital says, “One’s preparedness in an emergency situation is an absolute necessity. Here at Tawam, we want to ensure that our personnel, especially in the Emergency Department, are always ready and equipped to face crucial situations. Regular emergency drills are held at Tawam and across all SEHA hospitals to gauge the level of alertness and preparedness of our staff in order to serve our patients better. Only through exercises like these that we can all become accustomed to disaster thus, allowing for orderly and organised operations in the Emergency Department should a similar scenario occur in real life.”
Tawam Hospital is part of the SEHA Health System and is owned and operated by SEHA which is responsible for the curative activities of all the public hospitals and clinics in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi.
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