How to Improve Hospital Emergency Preparedness

Emergency preparedness focuses on preparing for an influx of activity and designing a coordinated plan that minimizes the waste of resources, time, and efforts. Hospitals are a critical element within the disaster medical response system. They must work closely with local government, and other organizations to plan, prepare and respond to any public health emergencies.

The Challenge

Impactful incidents can often occur without notice or warning. This can result in hospitals experiencing an unexpected influx of new patients, forcing them to quickly adjust from normal operations to the relevant emergency response plan.

Ensuring that all hospital personnel and resources are fully prepared for an incident can be logistically challenging. Current and potential patients must be taken care of, while also maintaining the safety of all patients and professionals is a priority.

Planning is Key

Hospitals, in general, are required to have emergency operations plans due to liability risks and best response practices. These plans take into account the different emergency scenarios that could potentially occur, all of the people that can be affected, as well as the resources and personnel needed to properly administer care.

Personnel Preparedness

Conducting exercises and training is a critical element of preparedness. All human resources must be trained and fully understand the correct processes to follow in an emergency situation. They must be provided with opportunities to practice their emergency response roles so they are well prepared to perform those response duties for any and all hazards.

What is involved? Record, describe, engage, and communicate human resources. Build a skillful and experienced response team through continuous training and skill refreshments/upgrades.

D4H Personnel and Training is a highly proactive system designed to easily manage the administration of personnel, qualifications, training, attendance, and availability. Measure performance and collaboratively engage your personnel to reach the highest standard of emergency preparedness.

Equipment Preparedness

Hospitals have equipment that can be deployed to support their emergency responses. It is important to establish, grow, and maintain their preparedness across the entire equipment cache.

What is involved? Describing, preparing, inventorying, and tracking of resources and their maintenance schedules. Equipment use, loss, inspections, repairs, expirations, retirement, activating, and dispatching resources all need to be centrally tracked in one robust system.

D4H Equipment Management is a smart equipment and consumable readiness software for easy inventory administration. The platform enables you to ensure all of your equipment is ready to respond with proactive inspections, repairs, expiry dates, and service history logs.

A Single Preparedness System

Emergency preparedness is achieved, and maintained, through a continuous cycle of planning, organizing, training, equipping, exercising, evaluating, and taking corrective action. The illustration below shows how an existing hospital emergency strategy and capabilities can be unified into a single preparedness system:

D4H Readiness and Response Software provides a complete information management system for hospital emergency preparedness. With D4H, hospitals can deploy a dedicated and reliable emergency preparedness software solution that has been specifically built to enhance their emergency preparedness and response capabilities. The platform has been designed to ensure their emergency response personnel and equipment are in a permanent state of preparedness. It achieves this by moving records, scheduling, qualifications, inspections, and inventories into a secure and reliable cloud software platform, adding proactive alerts and reminders in a single dashboard.