Hospital Disaster Plan: the experience of a Brazilian hospital

Every health institution needs to be prepared for a mass casualty event and some Hospital Accreditation programs ask for this preparedness. This article aims to propose a critical reflection on the development and implementation of a Hospital Disaster Plan from that premise. This hospital developed this one and uses periodic simulations to train its team. The Prevention and Disaster Response Committee is responsible for the review, update, disclosure, simulation and validation of the Plan, which remains available on the hospital’s intranet. It is disclosed through an e-learning and trained by periodic Simulation with Debriefing at the end. This plan is triggered by the decision of the Local Command Center. The START method is used for triage. Green victims are advised to go to an amphitheater outside the emergency room. Red victims are placed in the Emergency Room and the yellow ones in a larger place. These different areas of care need an independent communication to the Central Crisis Management (CCM). The team organization, logistics and flow of care, as well as the organization of the CCM become better according to the repetition of the Simulations. It concludes that e-learning is an effective method of disclosure, the isolation of the green victims outside the emergency room avoids turmoil in the other areas of care, the flow of care needs to be unidirectional, Debriefing is an important tool to identify problems, the communication of different areas with CCM may work better with independent channels.

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Hospital Disaster Plan, Simulation, Catastrophe