Emergency Management: Being Prepared During a Crisis (Podcast)

Nurses need to be ready for patient surges during any type of emergency, ranging from natural disasters to mass shootings.

“We have to be able to take care of these patients in an appropriate and expedited manner because we don’t know what else is coming in,” says Scott Hantz, MSN, MBA, RN, EMT-P, Director for Surgical Services Nursing at Cleveland Clinic and an expert in emergency management. “I do feel education is the key to success.”

Hantz discusses the importance of emergency management preparedness and multidisciplinary training for potential scenarios in the latest episode of Cleveland Clinic’s Nurse Essentials podcast. He covers:

• Why nurses in all specialties need to be trained in emergency management
• How caregivers can prepare for patient surges and respond appropriately
• The importance of ample supplies and solid communication during an emergency
• Taking care of patients, their families and caregivers during these situations
• Training techniques, including tabletop exercises, live exercises and after-action reviews

Click the podcast player above to listen to the episode now, or read on for a short, edited excerpt. Check out more Nurse Essentials episodes at my.clevelandclinic.org/podcasts/nurse-essentials or wherever you get your podcasts.

Podcast excerpt

Podcast host Carol Pehotsky, DNP, RN, NEA-BC: When we think about preparing for the worst, we hear about sometimes people have to get creative. They have to improvise, and you can't really train for that. … How do you start making those really difficult decisions about whether to improvise and when to change your level of care?

Hantz: So, that’s a very difficult question. And it's a question that I don't think anybody takes lightheartedly.

I think you have to know a couple pieces of information. One, what is your capacity? What is your surge ability? If you're in an emergency room that has five beds and you get 30 patients, you're going to be real busy real quick. If you have 30 beds and you get four patients from a car accident, it's surging your ability because you have four critically ill patients, but nothing should change.

So, you have to know what type of event is happening, where you're at and is it going to continue to come in. What do I mean by that? If you have a natural disaster – where you have a hurricane, tornado – you may be getting patients for a day and a half. If you have a shooting, that shooting may end pretty quickly, and you're going to know probably before the news even happens that there's a shooting.

So, your first question to yourself is what's going on? Once you figure that out, what's the capability of your hospital? How many ORs do you have? How many ICU beds? How many ED beds do you have? And that's going to be a specific question each location has to ask themselves. Because some hospitals may surge at three patients, some may surge at 25 to 50. It all depends.