Organizations test response time

BY BARBARA GREENBERG
Commercial-News

DANVILLE May 08, 2008 11:25 am

— “Be prepared” is more than a scout slogan to local health organizations — it’s a regular part of their routines.
Provena United Samaritans Medical Center and Vermilion County Health Department conducted exercises Wednesday to measure their emergency preparedness and response time.
Other health departments and hospitals in Champaign, Macon, Coles, DeWitt and Piatt counties will conduct similar tests of their plans this week.
Both Provena USMC and Provena Covenant Medical Center in Urbana participated in drills Wednesday. Facilities could pick their own disaster scenarios, and the Danville site chose to respond to an “attack” with the chemical agent mustard gas.
Motorists trying to get through on Logan Street between Fairchild and Williams streets had to detour for a few hours.
The hospital held the first stages of its exercise outdoors near the ER. Decontamination equipment and personnel were set up there and treated “victims” of the gas attack with a thorough shower inside a tent.
Michelle Johnson, an RN on Provena’s 4West who worked at the tent, said, “We wear these suits to protect us from any contamination. We have our scrubs on underneath, then the blue plastic suit and then a hood with an outside air source.
“With our rubber gloves and boots, any gaps between them and the suit get taped,” she said.
Those volunteer “victims,” all Danville High School students, had swimsuits on under their clothes in preparation for their decontamination shower.
When questioned by the nurses, the “victims” listed their symptoms as they’d been instructed.
“My skin is burning,” Javier Alvarez, a DHS senior, told nurses. “I’m getting blisters, and there’s snot coming out of my nose.”
Alvarez took off everything but his swimsuit and headed into the decontamination tent for his very real shower.
Nurses stationed at the shower exit wrapped him and the other shivering “victims” in towels, evaluated their condition and wrote their vital statistics on a tag.
Then they sent them into the ER, where a tag with a design malfunction caught the attention of hospital staff. Each patient wore one, marked by a triage nurse to describe that person’s condition.
When the perforations for those sections were torn, all that remained at the bottom of the tag was the word “morgue.” These patients were far from dead, in both real life and in the scenario.
“This tag needs to be redesigned,” Dave Stone, Provena’s regional director of emergency operations, said. “That’s part of why we hold these drills. We want to address any problems that may come up.”
Across town, the Vermilion County Health Department conducted its own exercise at Walgreens Accounting on East Voorhees Street. Mass dispensing of an antibiotic for employees “exposed” to anthrax was the focus of VCHD’s scenario.
“We have different objectives and capacities than the hospital,” Linda Bolton, VCHD community educator, said.
“In a real life situation, we’d have to provide medication for about 82,000 Vermilion County residents in 48 hours. We would have to engage major employers’ involvement to accomplish that.”
The 900 employees at Walgreens Accounting made it an ideal candidate for the exercise.
About 750 of them filled out information sheets, not just for themselves but for any family members who lived with them. Medicine would be dispensed for entire families at the employee’s worksite.
“This would be a closed point of dispensing,” Stephen Laker, VCHD’s health administrator, said. “This exercise will help us test our plan to go to sites that employ large numbers of people.
“This company has been very cooperative,” he said.

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