Imagine for a moment that you’re at work or walking into work when you hear someone screaming at the top of their lungs. You can’t yet determine what they are saying but carefully continue towards the door. As you round the corner, someone is walking towards you that is upset, and you can see them still talking softly by the movement of their mouth. As they pass you, they mumble, “Think you can let my family die, and I won’t do anything about it. All of them will get what’s coming.”
As you come inside, everyone is quiet and staring in disbelief. One of the family members makes a sarcastic comment about how they must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed, and several awkwardly chuckle for a moment. Within a few minutes, it was business as usual!
Shortly after the incident occurs, you can get your colleague away from everyone, and you ask what this person was mad about and who they were. Your colleague states that they weren’t sure who the person was and never said anything about why they were furious. They continued with how the person just kept yelling about how bad we were at our jobs and how we sent them a bill. After hearing more about the story, you tell them what you heard them say, but after sharing the story, you both assume it was just a grieving loved one, who’s short on money, and taking out their frustration on whoever will listen.
About a week later, you hear a loud popping noise while on break, “POP. POP, POP…. POP… POP, POP, POP.” Then you hear screaming and yelling but can’t make out the words. Did something break?
You open the door and see someone running towards you with what looks like blood coming from their arm. As you adjust where you’re looking, from their arm back to their face, you can see your colleague saying, “run.” Then, pop! In disbelief, frozen and unable to move, you watch your colleague fall lifelessly.
While the information listed above is fiction, healthcare agencies work around families, bystanders, and persons experiencing highly emotional situations and/or behavioral illnesses all day. It’s not a stretch to think how a grieving, confused, or person suffering from a behavioral emergency, may redirect those emotions toward hurting those whom they feel have caused them to feel this way or maybe let them down.
Is your healthcare agency ready to survive this type of event?
What do you or would you do differently? What do your plans, policies, or procedures say you would do differently in this scenario? Now the most important question is, do ALL your colleagues understand what actions should be taken if this scenario were to take place at your facility? Do you know what to expect from your local partners? Do your local partners know what they can expect from you or your staff? Do the patients or their families know what to expect?
If you want to confidently answer yes to these questions, it’s important to remember to test those plans, policies, procedures, etc., to ensure what’s on paper works. If you find through an exercise it doesn’t work, you identify why it didn’t work, and how can you fix this gap. This is HOW you can keep yourself, your staff, your patients, and their families safe.
It's easy to sit back and “armchair quarterback” situations that impact other people. However, while most people say they would run, hide, or fight back, without training, practice, and a mindset of what to expect, they may not react quickly enough!
A writer by the name of Amanda Ripley wrote a book called “The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why.” In this book, Amanda does a great job examining how our minds work during moments of crisis. She captures several first-hand accounts that illustrate why our brains don’t always react the way we assume they would during moments of crisis, and how training our minds, maybe through exercise, helps us to react more rapidly. Her book is a powerful and eye-opening read!
Do your BEST. Prepare for the WORST.
The Torchlight Preparedness team isn’t just here to make a living; we are here to impact the living. For that reason, our community-wide exercises are open to all medical facilities. Examples include long-term care, assisted living, nursing homes, doctor offices, ambulatory surgery centers, hospice houses, home health, critical access hospitals, hospitals, rehabilitation facilities, end-stage renal disease (or dialysis centers), and more.
If your agency falls under the CMS ruling, where they’ve placed your facility into one of the 17 medical facility types, then the active threat disaster exercise is tailor-made for your team. This functional or full-scale exercise will separate the medical facilities into inpatient, outpatient, and home health categories, allowing the Torchlight team to inject the most appropriate information throughout this disaster exercise.
For additional information, please click here to select the proper exercise for your agency or facility. Until then, Benjamin Franklin said it very well, “by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”
Hit our buy now easy button to schedule your community-wide exercise today.
This Exercise will Potentially Exercise Components of the Following Community Lifelines:
Security and Safety
Communications
Health and Medical
Transportation
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