By Healthcare Facilities Today

Putting a disaster plan in place is a critical step for a healthcare facility, but it becomes especially important for the facility operations department — without their proactive action, doctors and nurses will have nowhere to practice, and a community safe house could be lost, according to an article on the Facility Care website.

"In reality, however, it’s difficult to truly prepare for the chaos of a disaster. Each event teaches a lesson, and it is the facility manager’s (FM) job to make sure that this lesson isn’t learned at the expense of patient, or staff, lives," the article said.

“Hurricane Katrina was an indescribable event that forced the hospital and the community to deal with issues that were not planned for,” Ken McDowell, safety officer for Memorial Hospital at Gulfport in Gulfport, Miss., said in the article.

Prior to Katrina, Memorial had a plan in place, a plan to help the hospital staff prepare for nearly any disaster.

Memorial Hospital at Gulfport adopted a National Incident Management System-compliant emergency operations plan, which is an all-hazards plan. There are incident-specific appendices for hurricanes, tornadoes, loss of essential utilities, security, safety, etc., McDowell said in the article.

Having a plan in place allowed the staff at Ochsner Baptist Medical Centerto ride out the storm, but continually updating that plan is necessary.

“We have a disaster plan, and we had one at the time of Hurricane Katrina. It worked out well,” Wayne Hill, director of the physical plant at Ochsner, said in the article. "We made some changes to improve it in case we ever have to go through that again.”

For Hill and his team, many of those improvements involved better fortifying major equipment to protect it from any future flooding. 

Read the article.