News

Training exercises polishes emergency readiness

Thu, 15 Nov 2018 11:53:00

More than 70 staff from Mildura Base Hospital and local emergency services honed their emergency response readiness in a combined “Emergo” disaster response training exercise this week.

Emergo Train System is an internationally-recognised interactive disaster training tool that allows the measurement and evaluation of a hospital’s readiness for a mass casualty incident while working in cohesion with other local emergency services.
MBH Director of Workforce Avi Kumar said hospital Code Brown incidents were emergency situations involving mass casualties from either natural or man-made disasters.
“The sorts of incidents we’re talking about might be severe weather, transport accidents or industrial incidents,” Mr Kumar said.
“They can happen anywhere and at any time, so it’s important for us to test our practices and procedures every couple of years,” he said.
Over a period of four hours, paramedics, doctors, nurses and other hospital staff were put through a scenario which involved a commercial aircraft crashing just short of the runway at Mildura airport, resulting in 150 casualties.
The desktop/whiteboard exercise, facilitated by the Department of Health and Human Services, was to test and improve discharge planning, patient surge and managing mass fatalities.  It also evaluated supply chain integrity, information sharing and the protecting and preserving of patient records as well as the response to requirements such as transporting additional essential equipment.
“Magnetic symbols representing patients, staff and resources are known as ‘gubers’ and are used on white boards to train and test the preparedness for and response to major incidents and disasters,” Mr Kumar said.
“As the scenario played out, the hospital incident management team worked together to put in place community-wide responses by liaising with Mildura Rural City Council, the Mildura Private Hospital, Wentworth Hospital, Ramsay Health Care and even aged care providers.”
Mr Kumar said the exercise had been successful and an invaluable learning opportunity for staff and partner agencies, with all participants deliberately put under some serious pressure.
“Just to go through a real-life scenario which could unfold at any time is a great training opportunity that tests our inter-operability and our multi-agency response to doing what we do best, and that is patient care,” he said.
“Phone numbers change, staff change, even the nature of events change, so to exercise the basics of testing our own responses and preparedness and calling in various stakeholders so they could put in place their own disaster plans is a really valuable exercise.”