If a water shortage affected the east end of the city and areas had to be evacuated, would everyone be ready?
That question was being asked in Barrie yesterday during a mock evacuation at the Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre (RVH).
Prepping for the last six months, staff at the RVH executed a plan Tuesday to prepare for an event that if it should happen, would see a mass evacuation of the hospital’s patients.
RVH president Janice Skot said that the plan is crucial.
“Everyday, the community and the region expect us to be ready for an emergency,” said Skot. “We’re open 24/7 and 365 days a year, so we often have long exercises in order to plan for our emergency services.”
Today’s mock emergency was that there was a water shortage on the hospital’s east end of the city and plans to evacuate were more complicated than tests done previously.
“So usually when we do our evacuations we move the mock patients to the Georgian College and utilize that space,” said Skot. “But, of course, this time it is the whole east end that is affected so we have to plan for that and we are locating to the East Bayfield Recreation Centre.
"We are not going into the rec centre as they programs happening today that we didn’t want to disturb, but in an emergency case we would," she added.
The mock situations are designed to test staff response time and how to use the staging areas.
Volunteers were used for the mock patients and their situations ranged from injured and unable to walk, a pregnant woman expecting triplets who could not be left alone, children and the elderly.
One of the areas used today to host the mock patients was outside the hospital’s emergency doors.
Many elements need considering and that takes the co-operation of more than just hospital staff.
“We do involve our partners including the city of Barrie, the Barrie fire, Barrie police and Simcoe County so it is a big co-ordinated effort, for sure,” said Skot. “We obviously want everyone to know that it is a mock exercise so we are not alarming the public, but at the same time we try to make it as real as possible so we can actually really learn something from it.”
Approximately every four years the RVH’s emergency preparedness plan is put to the test in co-operation with organizations throughout the region and that takes a lot of planning in itself.
Heather Stubbs is the interim security and location lead and told BarrieToday that from all accounts so far, this was a good day.
“To date, we have trained approximately 1,500 staff members on evacuation and for the day we are very happy to have got between 60 and 80 volunteers that have come in as mock patients and visitors here at the hospital,” said Stubbs. “We are living in a world where infrastructure does fail and for this particular event it was called a Code Grey and has it went thus far today it looked like all went reasonably well.”
The information obtained Tuesday by the many who were relied on to mark down any and all key points with the drill will be looked over and evaluated.
“This will be several weeks out as we compile the information,” said Stubbs. “We are going to be debriefing our mock patients and visitors and the EOC (emergency operations centre) will be doing the same and providing their input as to what was good and what needs changing and, of course, we will be gathering information from many other organizations throughout the region.
"While the information turnaround will be several weeks out, we will be doing a high-level de-brief for anything that is imminent and implementing that right away," she added.
