Every institution should have strategies and resources in place to handle unfortunate circumstances internally and externally. Disaster management is the preparedness of an organization to plan for and respond to emergencies and catastrophes. The strategies including taking both the pre- and post-event activities. The first stage is managing the risks while the last is dealing with the consequences of the event (Moşteanu, 2020). Health care institutions are facilities that must have a disaster management strategy in place. United States administration, the regional states, and the Joint Commission in charge of the Accreditation of Health Care Organizations mandates all hospitals to implement internal and external disaster management programs (Nash, 2017). Internal disaster plans are the policies that handle a firm’s crisis. This paper presents a pathogen management plan for Cedar Sinai hospital in the US.
Type and Size
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center started in 1902 with a twelve-bed capacity in the Angelino Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. The facility is now a leading nonprofit medical enterprise with an eight hundred and eighty-six inpatient capacities and serves more than one million people annually (Grein & Garland, 2020). The institution is multispecialty and is located in Los Angeles in California. According to Grein and Garland, 2020, the hospital has several branches in California and has employed over twenty thousand clinicians, ten thousand personnel, two thousand volunteers, and more than forty community groups.
Type of Internal Disaster
Cedar Sinai medical center has a special pathogen response drill team was set out to handle disease outbreaks both internally and externally. The hospital has established an emergency response team. The crew does training throughout the so they are ready for any highly contagious disease and can lead to severe illnesses (Grein & Garland, 2020). For instance, the team has successfully handled Ebola, Middle East Respiratory, and the current COVID-19 disease.
Administrative Staff to be Contacted
In case of any pathogenic outbreak in Cedar Sinai medical center, the primary clinical and administrative personnel to be recalled include: infectious disease doctors, nurses, critical care medics, a pediatrician, an obstetrician, and respiratory therapists. Other support staff necessary in this mission incorporate transport experts working with the ambulance to transport patients from one point to another. The laboratory technicians collect samples from suspected patients in a specially protected room (Grein & Garland, 2020). The environmental workers trained to dispose of waste can be infections, especially dirt coming from wards with already infected patients.
Communication Center
All communications for the Cedars Sinai disaster response team come from the hospital emergency department. The said section has the responsibility of conducting research and gathering information on all emerging issues impacting the hospital’s welfare. After gaining enough information on the issues of concern, the head of the department, together with the managerial team, calls for a meeting for everyone who is to be involved in the care process.
Specific Service Areas
The disaster response team offers a variety of services required for managing an emergency. The procedure begins with screening and assessing the patients to ascertain their actual state. Next, patients are triaged then send to different doctors as per their condition. Medication services include casualty, which handles cases that are not critical where individuals are treated and released; inpatient care accommodates patients who need more observation and ICU for severe cases.
Other Hospitals in the Area
There are various hospitals in Southern Californian that Cedar Sinai can strengthen the internal disaster plans. The Ronald Reagan UCLA Health Care Center, the UC San Diego Medical Center, and Scripps La Jolla healthcare facilities are the finest three examples of facilities that can collaborate with Cedar Sinai. These facilities can come together and mobilize resources to train response teams. Secondly, the institutions can form a combined research center to work on new pandemic and provide the correct information for the way forward.
Internal and External Transfers
Cedar hospital is designed to transfer patients from one place of the hospital to another is more effortless. Though the hospital’s main building has many floors, the building is designed with lifts and pathways that favor trolley and wheelchair movements. The hospital also has trained workers for moving injured patients without injuring them more. The doctors also guide the process of transferring clients from one point to another.
The Sinai hospital also engages in external transfers moving patients from the facility to other institutions as it might be required. The hospital also helps in external disasters by rescuing survivors and bringing them to the hospital for treatment. The process mentioned above is undertaken by trained doctors, nurses, and other supporting staff like ambulance drivers. The hospital is equipped with ambulances and trained first aider that are always on standby.
Evacuation Plan
The hospital has an evacuation team comprised of administrators, medics, and support staff. These individuals are trained on evacuating patients if the hospital has an internal emergency that necessitates patients’ removal. First, the person in charge assesses the situation then the action is communicated to everyone involved (Grein & Garland, 2020). Evacuation then starts with the most at risk or the individuals close to the exit and those who can move fastest.
Conclusion
The internal disaster management plan is just as important in the hospitals as doctors and medication. Without an emergency strategy, hospitals in the US will not be accredited as qualified health facilities. Cedar Sinai hospital is one of the best organizations in Southern California to handle external and internal disasters. However, some situations can overburden the hospitals, like the current COVID-19 response plan has exhausted the hospital resources. The above stated show that there is still room for improving hospital emergency strategies.
References
Grein, J., & Garland, J. (2020). Cedars-Sinai special pathogens program. Cedars-Sinai medical center.
Moşteanu, N. R., Faccia, A., & Cavaliere, L. P. L. (2020). Disaster Management, Digitalization, and Financial Resources: Key factors to keep the organization ongoing. In Proceedings of the 2020 4th International Conference on Cloud and Big Data Computing (pp. 118-122).
Nash T. (2017). A guide to emergency preparedness and disaster nursing education resources. Health Emergency and Disaster Nursing, 4(1), 12-25.