Incident Management Team Helps Hospitals Respond to Disasters

The nation’s hospitals aren’t necessarily well-versed on the Incident Command System (ICS), and tend only to follow the federal standard of using it in a disaster. But, according to one expert, that can lead to inconsistent and weak command centers. Has one facility found the answer?

In an article on the Government Technology website, Greg Santa Maria, who works with Sanford Health in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, says they have developed an incident management team that can deploy to any health facility dealing with a disaster and help out in command center operations.

Santa Maria says in his experience, although each facility in his network could generate an adequate number of staff members to meet the initial needs of an incident, most couldn’t maintain complex operations over numerous operational periods. This problem, he adds, becomes even more challenging when you add an incident requiring decontamination, and is still more challenging when you look at incidents requiring a lot of resource management like a pandemic.

“We began developing, almost innocently, what we see today: a deployable team of emergency operations center managers and incident management specialists who can respond to any affected facility in our health system, and assist the incident commander and the incident management team to achieve its objectives,” Santa Maria says. “The team has 24 members, and there isn’t a second string. Team members are trained to a particular level. We eventually plan to have at least three members at each hospital, which would triple the team number.”

In the article, Santa Maria discusses how he developed the teams, and the roles they play in responding to an emergency or disaster. He also discusses various training initiatives and how the teams are activated for particular events.

To read the full article, click here: http://www.govtech.com/gt/365419?topic=290167