UW News

September 9, 2002

University of Washington Medical Center puts planning into practice in face of bioterrorism threat

In the wake of last year’s terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., and the subsequent anthrax contamination of the postal system that killed five people, emergency planning at University of Washington Medical Center moved into high gear. Since the first meeting of its expanded disaster planning committee in early October, the hospital has reviewed existing disaster plans for areas needing improvement and then moved rapidly to implement those changes.

The first step was to recruit teams from across the medical center involved in patient care, pharmacy, security, personnel management, communications and many other areas. The disaster planning committee then started working on assessing and then improving the overall Hospital Emergency Incident Command System, or HEICS. Then the development of a bioterrorism readiness plan began, incorporating the idea of scalability — making the plan, like other disaster plans at UWMC, responsive to events that involve any number of patients, from a few to thousands.

“The concurrent development of specific emergency assignment sheets and continual training of staff and faculty during all the hospital shifts have made UWMC better able to respond to emergencies,” says Preston Simmons, senior operations officer at UWMC. “We’ve created plans and then practiced scenarios ranging from accidental chemical spills and natural disasters to bioterrorist attacks in the Pacific Northwest.”

These plans have been tested with drills every few months involving virtually every department of the medical center. Hospitals are required to hold at least two drills per calendar year. One drill is designed to respond to an external problem, such as an earthquake, and the other to respond to an internal problem, such as a power failure. UWMC has exceeded this standard in order to practice dealing with mass casualty incidents in the Seattle area. This enabled medical center departments to practice procedures for decontamination of chemically exposed victims outside the medical center and triage of victims suffering from attack-related injuries or infection control in the event of a purposeful exposure of the public to an infectious agent such as small pox. The frequent drills allow the disaster planning committee to spot potential problems and resolve them, through new procedures and staff education.

Training for nurses, physicians and other caregivers at UWMC now includes information on recognizing and reporting symptoms of most biological and chemical agents. A surveillance plan is in place for reporting unusual trends of symptoms or diagnoses to Public Health — Seattle & King County as part of the effort to provide epidemiological evidence in the event of a bio-terrorism event.

Vital communications functions have been enhanced with the use of six communications systems, ranging from hand-held radios to the Internet, to assure that nurses, doctors and staff are fully informed during emergencies. Volunteer credentialling systems have been set up so that displaced medical personnel unable to reach their usual workplaces will be able to help at UWMC during a major disaster.

The UWMC emergency plan incorporates mutual assistance agreements with public and private entities in the community, including hospitals, first-responders including the Seattle Police and Fire Departments, Public Health — Seattle & King County and companies like the Boeing Co.

“The goal is to not only provide routine emergency services, but to be ready for the unexpected as well,” Dr. Eric Larson, UWMC medical director, says.

Simmons adds, “Our emergency management plan allows UWMC to respond quickly and professionally to disaster situations in our area, whether natural or man-made. It is our means of carrying out our mission of superlative patient care.”

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