Emergency preparedness is critical for healthcare organizations

Always be prepared is more than a slogan for boy scouts, it’s the reality of life for most healthcare professionals. Whether you’re looking back at the international health crisis of COVID-19, or looking forward to caring for an aging population, it’s no question that healthcare workers need to be prepared for emergencies. But what are the best ways to do that?

As we near the end of the first week of National Safety Month, we at GoFormz are excited to take a look at ways hospital staff and healthcare workers can best embrace the weekly theme: Emergency Preparedness. In 2022, the American Hospital Association (AHA) released the Convening Leaders for Emergency and Response (CLEAR) Field Guide for Emergency Preparedness, a new resource for healthcare professionals and administrative staff. This new guide covers four main sections your hospital staff should be well-versed in for an effective emergency preparedness strategy.

Open Cross-Sector Communication Lines

The best thing you can do in any emergency is to abolish siloed departments in your facility. When emergencies strike, it’s critical that everyone be on the same page, and that all communication lines are kept open. Whether this looks like ensuring your intensive care unit are in touch with your surgical departments, or that your nursing staff has a direct line to all administrative and admissions teams, everyone should have a way to understand what current capacities are, which cases are most trying, and which staff is available to provide extra support. 

This can often extend outside your hospital, and even outside your direct organization. Emergency services, public health, and all healthcare clinics play an important role in fostering better healthcare and safety for their communities. How well-versed is your staff in other local, possibly smaller or specialty, clinics? Have your teams had any introductions to them at all? In emergency situations, it’s all hands on deck, even if you need to borrow a few. Don’t hesitate to build relationships with other organizations in your area to keep an eye on trending health concerns, as well as potential resources that each of you can offer the other - from supplies to staff.

Don’t be afraid to reach out to non-traditional partners as well. If you have medical education institutions in your area, this can be an untapped wealth of supplies and personnel that can help with many facets of caregiving. Additionally, local religious organizations, charity groups, and non-profit organizations may have resources available, from volunteers to connections at additional locations. 

The best thing you can do to strengthen these lines of communication is to work proactively with local groups and organizations before emergencies strike. If there are community events (such as music festivals, fairs or community gatherings, and even parades) work with these other organizations to show up together. This can be a great opportunity to build relationships while also enhancing your presence in the community, and even share a bit of public education on pressing matters specific to your location. These are only a few of the possible ways to build better emergency networking, the CLEAR field guide has additional recommendations.

Build Up Your Workforce

Staffing shortages aren’t unique to the healthcare industry, but it’s a sector where those shortages are felt by entire communities around them. And it’s no secret that staffing shortages in the healthcare industry have been a growing problem, with on-the-job stress levels and burnout growing, as cited by multiple healthcare news outlets. Unfortunately, this trend sets a poor foundation for emergency preparedness, especially when so many healthcare organizations are in continuous need. 

Even despite the shortages, it remains a key part of your emergency preparedness plan to support your staff the best you can. Whether that’s easing the workload, and minimizing burnout, among your current practitioners and personnel or by working with recruiters at multiple medical education facilities, it should be a top priority. Some ways you can do this are by expanding your telehealth capabilities to make visits easier not only on your team but also easier on your patients. Telehealth also has the unique advantage of minimizing exposure to viruses and bacteria, keeping your staff better protected and able to work.

Implementing other digital tools, such as flexible staffing pools, can also help support your teams while simultaneously building relationships with other healthcare organizations in your area. Much like substitute teachers are able to see openings and opportunities at a variety of schools, you can work with other facilities in your area to build a staffing pool of flexible work staff. This can provide opportunities to more healthcare providers looking for more control over their schedules, while also offering nursing, janitorial, and administrative support to a specific location in need. And by sharing staffing resources, you can familiarize yourself with a wider array of individuals throughout your community’s healthcare system to keep more lines of communication open.

Share Information, Call Out Misinformation

It may go without saying, but being able to share information quickly between your teams is a must-have in emergency situations. Digital tools have made real-time collaboration and communication much easier, and if your hospital hasn’t yet looked into bringing some of these technologies into your emergency preparedness plan, you could be missing out.

Digital solutions, from scheduling portals to HIPAA-compliant forms, can take much of the burden off of your administrative staff. Additionally, this creates a digital version of your patient data, ready to be sent out to other healthcare organizations in your area, or even anonymized and sent to larger government agencies for a faster analysis and response time in the case of national emergencies.

Just as important as sharing the information you and your practitioners have gathered is keeping an eye on misinformation and stopping it in its tracks. In emergency situations, it can be easy to take every detail passed along as truth, with few people stopping to question it. Whenever possible, be sure that your information is factually accurate, and never hesitate to question the information you receive from others, especially from unverified sources.

While the spread of misinformation and disinformation is inevitable, it doesn’t need to gather credibility or traction within your organization. Ensure that all new information pertinent to the emergency at hand goes through a thorough fact-checking process, and work with every member of your team to ensure that clear and accurate information is disseminated as quickly as possible. This can be done through daily check-in meetings, or even posted in real-time on your company intranet. Whatever ways your team prefers to communicate, make sure that you’re filling those arenas with credible, researched information.

Make Preparedness a Daily Routine

Healthcare professionals have plenty within their daily routine already, but the best way to ensure that your emergency preparedness plan is effective is to make sure it’s a part of their daily routine. Encouraging team members to keep emergency planning a part of their daily work can ease the stress when the next emergency arises.

One of the best ways to accomplish this is by integrating new technologies and systems into your daily workflow. If you need practitioners to track patient data in secure HIPAA forms for emergencies, make sure that those same digital HIPAA forms are the ones they use every day. If you’re encouraging more open lines of communication between different departments, don’t wait for an emergency. Get your teams collaborating on everyday activities and comfortable knowing which departments have access to different resources.

All of these things together will make for a much smoother experience when the next emergency arises, but will also give your team the ability to run a trial of how well these systems work. There’s nothing worse than an emergency preparedness plan with new systems and processes that your staff isn’t comfortable using, so make sure that everyone has preparedness on their minds at all times. After all, being prepared isn’t just for boy scouts anymore.

About GoFormz

GoFormz is a digital forms solution that helps bring your healthcare data into a single, actionable place. We believe that everyone should be able to fill out their forms online and deliver products and services that redefine how people and businesses collect and process information. From a digital client intake form to digital patient records, GoFormz can help keep your data secure, accurate, and all in one place. With our no-code Template Editor, it’s quick and easy to build your digital forms and get your data in the places you need it most.