Your health center plays a critical role in supporting its community. In the event of an emergency, your facility becomes even more important, which is why it’s essential you have plans in place to combat and overcome disasters.
Emergencies can strike unexpectedly and at any time, so preparation is central to best positioning your health center to respond efficiently and effectively.
The Impact of Emergency Preparedness
Being sufficiently prepared for a disaster has significant benefits for your staff, your patients, and your community as a whole. It helps your organization:
- Maintain continuity of care.
- Respond effectively to an emergency.
- Allocate resources to where they are most needed.
- Engage other community organizations for seamless collaboration.
- Communicate clearly with your community.
- Train and prepare staff.
How Your Health Center Should Prepare
The creation of an emergency preparedness plan is an effective way to detail your disaster protocols in a single, central document. To ensure complete coverage applicable to all members of staff, your plan should include:
- A Risk Assessment — Identify the disasters your health center is most likely to face and provide details on their expected effects and impacts, the risks they pose, your capabilities in responding, and other related data.
- Roles and Responsibilities — Document at least two points of contact for each department and specify their exact role and responsibilities in the event of an emergency.
- A Command Structure — List the people at your facility who hold roles that are important during a disaster, such as your safety officer, liaison officer, or incident commander.
- Orders of Succession — You may also want to include an order of succession for each role featured in the command structure to provide direction if key personnel are unavailable.
- Resource and Asset Overview — Create detailed plans for:
- Acquiring and replenishing medications and supplies.
- Sharing resources with other healthcare organizations.
- Monitoring quantities of resources and assets.
- Establishing the sustainability of resources.
- Management of Staff — Explain how staff will be assigned during a disaster and list any support individual staff may require to continue working, e.g. transportation, housing.
- Management of Patients — Create clear plans for:
- Patient scheduling, triage/assessment, treatment, transfer, and discharge.Â
- Support for vulnerable populations, e.g. social services.Â
- The management of behavioral health patients.
- The continuation of behavioral health services.
- Patient tracking.
- Utilities and Supplies — Provide details on the critical utilities and supplies your health center will need, such as power and backup generators; water supply, decontamination, and usage; and medical gas and vacuum systems.
- Evacuation — Set the parameters for deciding whether to evacuate or shelter in place, then establish protocols in the event of evacuation, such as available transportation, the preservation and movement of patient records, the movement of patient provisions and personal effects, evacuation routes and locations, and securing equipment.
- Recovery — Detail how your health center will recover from the impact of a disaster, covering recovery protocols, the restoration of services and utilities, staff and patient re-entry, staff debriefing, and an after-action improvement plan.
- Staff Training — Map out a training schedule for your staff, including the courses they should complete and how often they should be delivered.
- External Collaboration — Identify the external agencies and organizations you have coordinated with to develop your emergency plan and outline the collaborative actions that have been agreed.
To get started on your facility’s emergency preparedness plan, use this template from the Louisiana Department of Health, which guides you through the process.
How CNECT Can Help
We’ve been supporting community health centers since our inception in 1979, and we know that emergency preparedness can save lives. Through their partnership with us, our members access discounts on products and services that are crucial to their emergency preparedness plan, including:
- Cybersecurity Solutions
- Communication Systems
- Critical Equipment and Personal Protective Equipment
- Facilities and MRO Support
- Emergency Food and Water
- Disaster Response Services
Alongside discounted prices, CNECT members also benefit from a streamlined supply chain. This proved crucial to many of our member health centers during the COVID-19 pandemic, as they were able to secure critical PPE through CNECT at a time when other suppliers were out of stock.
Build your health center’s emergency preparedness plan and save on the solutions you need to protect your staff, patients, and community with CNECT. To review the comprehensive support and solutions available to CNECT members, review our disaster preparedness flyer. If you'd like to join CNECT, contact our team today!