Intense Emergency Management course delivers key insights for LGH ED staff
“Sarah! Sarah! Where’s my wife? Where is she? WHERE IS SHE?” A distraught family member towers over and yells at the Search and Rescue Team assessing the victim count in an earthquake-shattered building. The times are tough as the team deals with darkness and searches an area that was once an organized office and is now a battlefield of overturned furniture, scattered equipment and trapped and injured people.
Thank goodness this was Feb. 4, 2014 and the building was the basement of Vancouver’s Waterfront Station. The victims and rescuers were a combination of maintenance staff, nurses, respiratory therapists, health inspectors and emergency department managers in training and the incident was a scenario, not a real event.
This was a Level One Light Urban Search and Rescue Course (LUSAR) and an absolute eye opener of the challenges we as health care providers may face if a mass disaster strikes our communities. A number of Lions Gate Hospital Emergency Department staff attended the LUSAR course and are now using the experience as a catalyst to streamline emergency management plans.
LUSAR Level One served as a powerful reminder that our emergency processes need to be continuously reevaluated and refined and taught participants how to:
- set up your own Emergency Response Team personnel
- apply the most common SAR techniques for searching a building
- run an Emergency Operations Centre; and
- plan, implement and practice a safe search.
Even though it was a practice session, you could sense the stress levels rise as the course instructor recreated an event with flooding buildings, trapped people and limited resources and asked us, “Now what are you going to do?”
With the disaster response tools gained from this course, LGH ED are looking forward to making their disaster response as smooth, effective and well thought as possible.
As ED department manager Angeline Bierstee highlighted, “We want to be ready.”
And as an ED staff member I agree. When Sarah’s husband does come in to the department anxious and concerned about her whereabouts and status, I want our team to be able to confidently say, “She’s right here and she’s okay.”
If you’re interested in LUSAR training, check out the CCRS for upcoming courses or contact Dave Reid at David.Reid@vch.ca because I highly recommend it!
LUSAR training course participants from the Lions Gate Hospital Emergency Department were: (l to r) Angeline Bierstee, Kara Bennett, Mandy Hengeveld and Peter Ramsey.