April 27, 2016
When natural disasters happen – and residents of Marshall County know all too well they do happen – medical experts have to trust their disaster training to kick in to handle the demand.
“I think we’re exceptionally prepared,” said Bill Smith, facilities management director for Marshall Medical Centers. “We’re constantly drilling and teaching to make sure we can meet the needs of our patients under the worst circumstances.”
The hospitals are required to conduct two disaster drills a year. Both have to push the system as far as it can go, even to worst-case scenarios Marshall Medical would not be expected to handle, such as providing security or bringing in supplies for the community.
“It lets us know how long we can sustain,” Smith said.
The hospitals educate their staffs annually in all aspects of disaster preparedness. It is not tornado specific, he said, even though hazard vulnerability analyses done each year show that the most likely danger is from tornadoes. Ice storms are another threat. For example, officials have to know how long the hospitals’ stock of food will last and how long the generators will run, which is a minimum of eight days at Marshall Medical, according to Smith.
Emergency
operating procedures assume things will go back to normal when a disaster winds
down. But officials also have to plan for a scenario with hospital buildings
being damaged. Plans must be in place for keeping patients safe if facilities are
compromised. The hope is, Smith said, to recover from any disaster within 24
hours.
“There will be occasions where we’re going to be overwhelmed,” he said. “but we do our best to plan for how we will deal with it. That’s all you can do.”
Five years ago when a band of tornadoes bore down on Marshall County, the hospitals’ disaster plans were put to the test. Neither hospitals had electricity but they did have generators, medicine and food.
Fortunately, the number of reported injuries from the storms was relatively low. Marshall North saw 14 storm-related patients in the ER that Wednesday. Marshall South saw 13 storm victims, of which three were critical and transferred. Those emergencies were in addition to the 86 other people who went to the ER on the day of the storm, which is a fairly average day.
Disaster planning and a big generator were keys to why both hospitals operated efficiently on the day of the tornadoes as well as during three days of power outage and four days of water concerns.
“We never were concerned about the adequacy of the power,” said Claudette DeMuth, director of marketing for Marshall Medical. “To be honest, our generator was under-whelmed running the entire hospital. We had plenty of power and diesel fuel to run for 300 hours. We had backup planned if needed.”
When Marshall County EMA said that pumping enough water up Brindlee Mountain would become a challenge because Arab Water Works was operating at only half-speed on generators, the hospital conserved water mainly by cutting back on showers for employees staying over in the labor pool facilities.
After the height of the whole situation, MMC critiqued its performance. The bottom line to MMCN’s response during and after the tornadoes was that the medical staff did a fine job, she said.
“We all felt positively about the way it went down.”