Q&A talks about disaster planning with Vincent DeSanti, assistant operations officer at Hebrew Health Care in West Hartford.
Q: Hebrew Home Health Care recently held a disaster planning drill. What was its impetus and what did Hebrew Home hope to accomplish?
A: After being involved in regional disaster planning with the 79 nursing homes in the Capital Region, the group determined that we needed to take our planning efforts to the next level and ensure everything worked well in a live exercise. Running the full-scale disaster exercise was important to make sure we are ready for anything both inside of our facility and the other 78 nursing homes.
Q: What took place and what lessons do you feel were taken away from it?
A: During the disaster exercise, there was a simulated tornado strike on the Bloomfield / West Hartford line that had a direct impact on the Hebrew Home & Hospital. The scenario had our facility experiencing some structural damage, loss of power and the loss of water, leaving our building incapable of supporting patient care. North Central CMED in Hartford sent out a regional emergency alert message through the Everbridge system that notified all of the long-term care facilities in the region of the incident. A web-based Emergency Reporting System was activated at www.mutualaidplan.org/region3CT and all facilities reported their open beds, operational status and any resources and assets they could provide (staff, transportation, equipment and supplies). After the West Hartford Fire Department arrived, the facility commenced an evacuation of more than 300 patients with 70 actual patients being moved using “mock patients” (actors). A Long Term Care Coordinating Center activated at Duncaster in Bloomfield and key responders went there to support the coordination of the disaster. Patients were moved to approximately 30 facilities with Chesthelm Health & Rehab in Moodus being the farthest and St. Mary’s Home in West Hartford being the closest. We learned how quickly we could gather information on regional capabilities when all facilities are reporting through the Emergency Reporting System. This gave us up-to-date bed information on the types of beds available in the region and transportation that other facilities could send us to assist in the evacuation. We also identified the need internally to establish an Incident Command System to coordinate internal resources during a disaster. This would assist in interacting with the Long Term Care Coordinating Center that is the group of volunteers that ensure all the key components are being covered and provides back-up resources to our facility if we are overwhelmed.
Q: Were there weaknesses exposed by the drill? Could Greater Hartford respond well if a tornado like that one that struck Springfield set down in the capital city?
A: The lessons learned from the exercise focused around three core things:
1) All regional facilities will be addressing internal training on how to prepare for a surge / influx of patients from other healthcare facilities in a disaster. Typically that has been the role of the hospitals in a mass casualty incident and now planning is focusing around nursing homes preparing for this.
2) Working on methods to effectively ensure communications among the state Department of Public Health, the Regional Coordination Center for Region 3 (Capitol Region), the Long-Term Care Coordinating Center and all 79 member facilities. This is a huge task to ensure we all understand our role and responsibility, but one that will be a primary focus for the next year.
3) Finally, the LTC-MAP will be focusing resources on making sure that all of the member facilities have updated contact information such as key individual contacts, pre-planned evacuation locations and everything down to the most current fax number.
Due to the continuous planning efforts and disaster exercises such as this one, we feel that the Greater Hartford region would persevere in a regional event such as what was experienced by Springfield. Springfield also had a Long Term Care Mutual Aid Plan in effect (MassMAP) that mirrors the Capital Region’s response and worked effectively in the disaster.
Q: Do disaster drills like this help a facility like yours with liability insurance? Does demonstration of better preparation improve the bottom line?
A: The goal is that insurers will begin to recognize this preparation and offer premium deductions based on the local and regional planning efforts and disaster exercises. Our continuous objective is to show our staff, patient / residents and their families that the preparation efforts we are doing are in place to protect them if a disaster were to strike.
Q: Could the corporate community benefit from disaster drill planning of this sort? What can be done by the private sector?
A: All levels of groups can and should participate in this type of disaster planning and exercises. As we were doing our planning, we realized all of the things that would be impacted by this disaster — schools, local businesses, emergency responders, residents of the community and the local government. During the exercise, many participating facilities called their vendors to see how long it would take to respond to them. The Capitol Region Council of Governments through its Capitol Region Emergency Planning Committee has established Regional Emergency Support Function 14 — Economic Recovery to begin to assist in these efforts for our region. This committee is chaired by Laurie Ann Scotti, a professional at Lincoln Financial Group. In the future, we would like to collaborate closely with this committee, since, as we all know, if the healthcare infrastructure fails in disaster, the capital region will have tremendous exposure.
