Mock plane crash to put hospital to the test
Richmond Hospital will be participating in an emergency practice exercise on April 17th that will involve a mock plane crash, mock patients and more than two dozen other organizations, including the Vancouver Airport, RCMP, and BCAS. Selected RNs and physicians from the ED, as well as Administration staff from Richmond will participate in the exercise, and key learnings will be shared across our Community of Care.
We will be testing four major aspects of our Code Orange plan:
- Emergency Response Team (ERT) — For all major emergencies (Code Black, Code Brown, Code Red, Code Orange, Code Grey and all self announcing disasters) that may require partial or full activation of the Emergency Plan, initial decision making will be executed by the Administrator On Call through consultation with the ERT. The ERT supports the AOC to assess imminent risks and decide how to respond to events that potentially impact services. We’ll test the activation of this team.
- Triage functional area — We’ll test our Code Orange triage functional area located in the ambulance bay outside the RH Emergency Department.
- Patient tracking — Past events have demonstrated the need to compile a central list of all patients connected to one event, regardless of the hospital delivering care. This exercise will be testing and evaluating a newly developed protocol to gather this information while supporting victims and protecting patient confidentiality. A Central Patient Information Officer located at VGH will be the coordination point for this information.
- Richmond CoC Emergency Operations Centre (EOC ) — The Richmond CoC relies on an EOC to support emergency responses. During the exercise we’ll practice EOC activation, action planning, site communications support, and communications between other participating hospital EOCs.
The exercise here will be hands-on and will involve:
- A number of mock patients arriving at the ED (NOTE: they will NOT be transferred to treatment areas)
- activating the Emergency Operations Centre
- a few units completing a census and staffing report
Other health care sites participating the exercise are BC Children’s Hospital; BC Women’s Hospital & Health Centre; St. Paul’s Hospital; and VGH and UBC Hospital.
This exercise is a tremendous opportunity for Vancouver Coastal Health and Richmond Hospital to test our plans and procedures for dealing with a mass casualty incident, and to practice our emergency response protocols. Participation in these exercises increases our capacity to cope with major events that may impact our communities and Health Authority.
For more information on this practice emergency exercise, please contact Mark Phillips, emergency management coordinator for Richmond at mark.phillips@vch.ca