The local weather station is forecasting heavy rains today that will continue for the next three days. High winds have been blowing over the past two days causing many fallen trees in the streets resulting in traffic congestion and lack of vehicle access to some areas.. Local officials predict flash floods with small stream and local flooding. There are areas in the community that have lost power with unknown time estimates for restoration of service.
The hospital's roof has been damaged by the winds and water is leaking into the facility. Hospital engineers are concerned the water may disrupt electrical circuits and lines. The hospitals emergency generators are located in the basement of the facility and could be impacted by flooding. Many staff are absent due to storm concerns and on-duty staff are requesting to go home to care for their families and property.
| * HICS recommendations | Medworxx ERS Solutions |
| Does your hospital regularly monitor pre-event weather forecasts and projections? | Keep informed with ERS' content management system. Include RSS feeds as information sources for the latest news and weather. |
| Does your hospital participate in pre-event local severe storm response planning with emergency management officials? | Build your response plans with the entire response community and keep them up to date with document sharing and version control. Test the plans with community exercises and drills then update accordingly with lessons learned from after action reports. |
| Does your hospital have procedures to communicate situation and safety information to staff, patients and families? | Prepare incident specific content templates ahead of time to maximize efficient information sharing during a response. Initiate the templates through the content management system to share this information with staff. patients, and families. |
| Does your hospital have a process to determine the need for partial or complete evacuation of the facility? | Store plans and policies in the central document repository. In addition to documents, many addition media forms can also be stored; including floor plans. In the event of an evacuation gather data from multiple systems (ADT, HR, time clocks, security sign-in,...) to get a real-time view of all persons in the hospital. |
| Does your hospital have a plan to communicate with the local EOC about the situation status, critical issues and request assistance? | Configure External Responder Portal to share information in real-time with partners and agencies not on ERS. For each portal, you decide what information to share and external responders see data as you update it via a secure web portal. |
| * HICS recommendations | Medworxx ERS Solutions |
| Does your hospital have a plan and back up (redundant) systems to maintain communications with the local EOC and other officials during and after the storm? | ERS is hosted externally in a distributed environment with redundancy across two continents. Even if local servers are effected, the parallel system will still hold all your plans, training, exercises, person records and resources. Since ERS is a web application, all functionality is available no matter where you log in from. |
| Does the hospital have a procedure to inventory equipment, supplies and medications? | Manage all resources including Persons, Equipment, Supplies, Facilities and Aircraft. Resource Management includes typing, inventories, deployment and tracking. |
| Does your hospital evacuation/relocation plan include notification of family members when patients are moved to other facilities? | Maintain a real-time contact directory of all internal and external personnel and volunteers. Use ERS notification tools to send information and updates to groups of users. |
| Does the facility have protocols to notify local public health of patient status and medical/health problems presenting by types of illness or injury? | Integrate with automated notification engines. Export the contact directory from ERS and get a report of who was notified and when they can respond. It makes no difference if the contacts are internal staff or external agencies. |
| Does your hospital plan for demobilization and system recovery during response? | Make the recovery activities part of every response plan. Conduct exercises on these plans and use the lessons learned from the after action report to help optimize your recovery efforts. |