Emergency preparedness

Emergency preparedness

Healthcare

Student’s Name

Institutional Affiliation

Healthcare

Emergency preparedness in healthcare setting reveals readiness for catastrophic events, either natural or humanmade. These events threaten patients’ safety and that of healthcare workers and employees. In many healthcare organizations, the preparedness serves as a regulatory compliance or operational necessity. Most regulations standards emphasize on critical issues to calamity events such as general healthcare safety, supportive healthcare systems, and healthcare practitioners’ roles and tasks.

Question One: Ways of Building A Culture of Emergency Preparedness in Healthcare

Healthcare organizations can establish a culture of preparedness through; creating a collaborative environment, implementing support processes for effective communication, evaluating community hazards, and putting into practice the preparedness plan.

Establishing a Collaborative Environment and Implementing Support Processes

The partnership may involve local leadership or healthcare community-based organizations such as the Red Cross to provide healthcare services to disaster victims. This collaboration is one-mission based because single healthcare cannot meet emergency disaster needs. Support processes that enhance improved communication play critical roles that are part of preparedness (Cory Worden, 2015). These roles include issuing of alerts, updating the community, and ensuring timely delivery of information to relevant leaders.

Evaluating the Community Hazards and Putting into Practice the Emergency Plan

Evaluating the nature of current factories in the community strengthens the culture of preparedness. Healthcare facilities inform the government agencies concerned with public health to take measures on how present hazards pose a risk to the health of people (Barrett, 2013). These facilities can decide to work with factories to plan for emergency programs after conducting a community hazard analysis. The aspect of building the culture of preparedness requires putting into practice the available preparedness plan (Kreisberg, Thomas, Valley, Newell, Janes, & Little, 2016). A healthcare facility can engage a particular manufacturing firm in testing the emergence plan at specific intervals. External evaluators such as government health and safety officials may examine the proposal. After examination, the results play a part in refining in-depth action strategies.

Question Two: Strategies to Sustain an Emergency Preparedness Program

The emergency preparedness plan needs sustenance to remain effective in serving its purpose. Value-based models such as regionalization and resource sharing can ensure preparedness capacity and capability of the emergency plan as follows;

Regionalization Model

Under the regionalization model, healthcare facilities can attain standardization, coordination, and centralization (Kreisberg et al., 2016). These three aspects ensure consistent service delivery during a disaster period. Through coordination, the deliberate plan of working together on how to offer services improves public health surveillance.

Resource Sharing Model

The central concept of this model is to sustain the emergency preparedness plan through the sharing of quality-improvement personnel to work on emergency projects. These projects meet expected and emergency operating conditions for boosting public health affected by the disaster. Local health facilities and agencies help in administering mass-vaccination centers in the case of a health emergency. This achievement results from the well-illustrated capacity for sharing resources among departments such as human resources and clinical supplies.

References

Barrett, C. C., & Whaley-Martin, A. T. (2013). Connections matter when disaster hits. Health progress (Saint Louis, Mo.), 94(6), 36-40.

Cory Worden, M. S., CSHM, C., & CHSP, A. (2015). ONE CAUSE, ONE CULTURE. ISHN, 49(9), 65.

Kreisberg, D., Thomas, D. S., Valley, M., Newell, S., Janes, E., & Little, C. (2016). Vulnerable populations in hospital and health care emergency preparedness planning: a comprehensive framework for inclusion. Prehospital and disaster medicine, 31(2), 211-219.

Medina, A. (2016). Promoting a culture of disaster preparedness. Journal of business continuity & emergency planning, 9(3), 281-290.