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Preparing for a surge in hospital patients

In late December 2016, Pierce County’s

two largest hospitals were operating at maximum

capacity. Emergency medical service providers were

struggling to find emergency departments with

available bed space, often forcing ambulances to

drive long distances to deliver patients to care.

Hospitals nearly always see an increase in patients

during winter flu season, but seldom to this degree.

In the third week of December within CHI Franciscan

Health, which operates nine hospitals in Western

Washington, between 65 and 100 percent of

emergency room beds were occupied by patients

who were waiting to be admitted to the hospital.

“We quickly realized that this was not just an

emergency department problem,” says Cindy Miron,

Program Manager of Emergency Preparedness at the

Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department (TPCHD).

Inpatient beds were full. Outpatient clinics were

seeing higher than normal capacity. Long-term care

facilities were reluctant to accept patients ready for

discharge out of concern for potential outbreaks

among their vulnerable residents.

Response Activation

Similar reports from King and Snohomish counties

lead the Washington State Department of Health

(DOH) to convene a call with local health officials in

early January. Four days later, the Northwest

Healthcare Response Network (the Network), the

healthcare coalition serving King and Pierce counties,

activated its Healthcare Emergency Coordination

Center to gather information that would help

regional and state authorities decide how to address

the problem.

“One of the challenges was figuring out what was

causing this and what, therefore, was the solution,”

says Nigel Turner, Director of Communicable Disease

Control at TPCHD. “What the Network brought to this

was a structure that could allow that type of analysis

to happen.”

In A DisasterThe work of the coalition allows our community to:

• Share information that supports crisis decision-making

• Analyze and report trends affecting healthcare delivery

• Create additional healthcare capacity when needed

• Work collectively to solve common problems

Over the next six weeks, the Network polled

healthcare organizations weekly regarding trends in flu

cases, bed capacity, staffing shortages and strategies

for addressing them. Results were compiled in

Healthcare Impact Reports that were shared with local

and state public health leadership and healthcare

stakeholders. Hospitals all along the Interstate 5

corridor had been struggling with a rising daily census

for more than two years. Since the reports indicated

this was not a particularly severe flu season, it was

determined that the ongoing capacity issues had

become so severe that some facilities now lacked the

space and resources to handle even minor surges in

patients without activating their disaster plans.

Situational Awareness

The Network’s reports assured providers that their

challenges were part of a larger problem that had the

attention of the state’s highest authorities. “These

communications were really helpful for me as a

leader,” says Margo Bykonen, Chief Nursing Officer for

Swedish Health Services. “It’s really hard for staff trying

to place all these patients and not having any bit of a

break. So to be able to see that we were not alone in

this, that this was a community-wide struggle, not just

within the Swedish system, was a big deal.”

IMPACT STORY: UNDERSTANDING REGIONAL HEALTHCARE CAPACITY CHALLENGES



The reports inspired some non-hospital facilities to take

measures to lighten the burden on emergency

departments. The Polyclinic, which includes nearly a

dozen outpatient centers in King County, stepped up its

standard flu season employee vaccination and

education campaigns, and encouraged providers to

minimize referrals to hospitals whenever safely possible.

“Knowing what was happening in the hospital sector

gave me the information I needed to make sure we

were ready if this became a bigger issue,” says Judy

Mitacek, the Polyclinic’s Business Continuity and

Compliance Coordinator for Disaster Preparedness.

“In an emergency, not everything can happen in the

hospital setting. Outpatient settings have to share

part of the burden of taking care of all of our patients

in King County.”

To be able to see that we were not alone in this, that this was a community-wide struggle…was a big deal.”

Margo Bykonen,Chief Nursing Officer, Swedish Health Services

Facilities across the region exercised relationships

they’d built through the Network to share best

practices for meeting the community’s healthcare

needs. Several important conversations revolved

around the work of the Network’s Disaster Clinical

Advisory Committee, funded almost entirely through

the HPP. This group of providers and health

department representatives meets quarterly to

develop regional strategies for clinically responsible

decision-making in times of crisis when the

community might face a shortage of important

resources ranging from staff to medicines. “Having

those ethically challenging conversations up front

about how we provide care when there are limited

clinical resources is so valuable,” says Bykonen, who

has served on the committee since 2012.

As the flu season waned in late February, hospital

censuses returned to their previous numbers, still

much higher than ideal. Armed with the knowledge

that daily capacity problems mean that a disaster

could overwhelm the healthcare system, state and

local health authorities, supported by the Network

and regional healthcare leaders, are convening a task

force to root out causes and seek long-term

remedies. Programs funded by the U.S. Office of the

Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response

and Network members are critical to that effort.

“Without them, you wouldn’t have the tools to

support healthcare in making tough decisions about

resource allocation or space allocation,” says Michael

Loehr, Chief of the DOH Office of Emergency

Preparedness and Response. “That would have to be

made up on the fly, and that’s not a good place to be

in a disaster.”

About the Network

We lead regional healthcare collaboration to effectively respond to and recover from emergencies and disasters in King, Pierce and Kitsap counties in Washington State. We serve the state’s medical epicenter, including 3.2 million residents, 140,000 healthcare workers, almost 50% of the state’s hospital beds, and nearly 2,000 healthcare organizations.

Planning Pays Off

In addition to situational awareness from the

Healthcare Impact Reports, healthcare organizations

benefited from previous efforts to plan for surge

situations. In recent years, the Network had hired

consultants to assist regional hospitals in identifying

ways to accommodate extra patients in the event of a

crisis. St. Joseph Medical Center, a CHI Franciscan

hospital in Tacoma, used that planning at the height

of this winter’s capacity challenges to add 20

temporary beds by converting single rooms in its

orthopedic wing to double occupancy and

implementing contingent staffing plans.

IMPACT STORY: UNDERSTANDING REGIONAL HEALTHCARE CAPACITY CHALLENGES



Getting the right patient to the right place during an evacuation

When a mock fire inside Swedish Medical

Center’s First Hill Campus in Seattle damaged the

primary electricity supply and generator on March

31, 2011, dozens of hospitals and emergency

response agencies worked together during a

disaster drill to evacuate 133 pediatric patients, 75

of whom required transfer to a Neonatal Intensive

Care Unit (NICU).

Healthcare for All Populations

“It is very daunting to think about all of the necessary

elements needed to ensure a safe and effective

evacuation,” says Cindy Miron, Emergency

Preparedness Program Manager at the Tacoma-Pierce

County Health Department. “Knowing that none of us

is alone and we can rely on partners is so important, as

is knowing what each other’s roles are.”

In the 2011 exercise, some patients were sent to

facilities that were not capable of providing the level

of care they needed, forcing the receiving hospitals to

stabilize and transfer them again, a risky and

avoidable extra step brought on by a lack of

understanding of which regional hospitals had certain

specialty services, recalls Eileen Newton, Emergency

Preparedness Manager for CHI Franciscan Health,

which participated in the exercise. “Swedish First Hill

cares for some of the sickest babies there are,” she

says. “You can’t just move them to any hospital. Most

hospitals don’t have a NICU, let alone a NICU that

provides as high of a level of care.”

As the regional healthcare coalition, the Northwest

Healthcare Response Network (the Network) has

created regional plans for evacuating and distributing

hospital patients, as well as exercises to test them

and identify gaps in preparedness.

The same is true for adult patients who need

specialty care. From heart-lung bypass machines and

continuous dialysis to behavioral healthcare for

patients who are incarcerated, there are many

services that are provided only at certain hospitals.

Yet at the time of the exercise, there was no index of

which hospitals provided which services. “If you don’t

have that information in advance, you slow down

your ability to respond appropriately, because you’re

having to get it on the spot, likely with compromised

communication systems,” says Barb Graff, Director of

the Seattle Office of Emergency Management.

In A Disaster

The work of the coalition allows healthcare in our community to:

• Follow up-to-date, practiced regional evacuation plans for hospitals and long-term care facilities

• Place specialty patients in hospitals that can provide the level of care they need

• Track and reunify patients and families

• Share information and resources

• Work together to be self-sufficient

IMPACT STORY: BUILDING CAPABILITIES TO SUPPORT HOSPITAL EVACUATION



Developing a Solution

In Spring 2016, the Network created a list of 70

specialty services and hired consultants to conduct a

survey to determine which among 33 hospitals and

acute care facilities in King and Pierce counties could

provide them. When the project wraps up in 2017,

the information will help each county’s Disaster

Medical Control Center (DMCC)—the hospital

responsible for coordinating the distribution of

patients in the event of an evacuation—save time

when placing patients.

We have to be able to continue to provide care to patients under any condition. The Network is helping us accomplish that.”

Eileen Newton,Emergency Preparedness Manager, CHI Franciscan Health

Although the healthcare players in the exercise

recognized the enormous complexity of

evacuating the community’s sole hospital, its

plight was low on the list of federal and state

priorities. This signaled to Newton the important

role that coalition-based collaboration has in

creating regional healthcare resilience.

The Value of the Network

“Before the Network it felt like we were running from

one exercise to another and we knew we had all

these gaps, but we really didn’t have a strategic plan

for how we were going to address them,” she says.

“We have to be able to continue to provide care to

patients under any condition. The Network is helping

us accomplish that. They’re helping make healthcare

agencies stronger and more prepared to deal with all

types of disasters.”

Although healthcare agencies and their emergency

response partners agree that a hospital evacuation

would require community-wide coordination and

support, no government agency has the mandate or

resources to maintain a regional healthcare

evacuation plan. That work falls to the Network.

“Healthcare organizations are required to have plans

and procedures in place to respond to disasters and

emergencies and they do a really good job at that,”

says the Network’s Planning and Preparedness

Manager Aaron Resnick. “But without organizations

like the Network and other coalitions, there are no

mechanisms to plan for emergencies outside of the

walls of any individual healthcare institution.”

Preparing as a Community

Exercises have also revealed the need for the local

healthcare community to be prepared to help itself

during a disaster, rather than rely on outside

resources that may be in short supply. In the Cascadia

Rising exercise, sponsored by the Federal Emergency

Management Agency in June 2016, the entire region

simulated a 9.0 earthquake.

As part of the exercise, St. Clare Hospital, a 106-bed CHI

Franciscan facility in Lakewood, Washington, learned

that its local water district had installed earthquake

sensors as a safety measure that would automatically

shut off the water supply in the event of tremors. The

lack of water would make it impossible for St. Clare’s to

maintain its environment of care, forcing administrators

to evacuate the building.

IMPACT STORY: BUILDING CAPABILITIES TO SUPPORT HOSPITAL EVACUATION

About the Network




Tracking loved ones during a disaster

On September 24, 2015, a Ride the Ducks

tour vehicle collided with a charter bus carrying 45

international students and staff from North Seattle

College on Seattle’s busy Aurora Bridge. Five people

were killed and 71 injured in the largest multi-

casualty incident Seattle had experienced. On what

was likely one of the worst days the victims’ families

had seen, emergency plans and tools facilitated the

exchange of critical information about the patients’

whereabouts and conditions.

Tracking Critical Information

Within minutes of the crash, the Seattle Fire

Department was on scene triaging injuries, while the

city’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM)

opened its Emergency Operations Center. Once

notified by OEM, the Northwest Healthcare Response

Network (the Network), which leads the regional

healthcare coalition, issued an alert through WATrac,

an online healthcare communication and resource

tracking system that hospitals use daily across the

state. Each Seattle hospital was prompted to update

its bed availability, facilitating the distribution of

nearly 60 accident victims to seven area hospitals and

one urgent care center.

The OEM coordinated among 15 separate city

departments and 11 partner agencies to manage

complexities ranging from the massive traffic impacts

to the notification of consulates representing the 14

foreign countries from which the accident victims

hailed. It relied on the Network for assistance in

tracking the location and condition of each of

the patients.

The Network held the master patient roster, with

staff members working as liaisons in the Emergency

Operations Center. Using their strong relationships

with emergency managers, they streamlined the

exchange of information and minimized the number

of phone calls so healthcare facilities could focus on

their top priority—providing quality, efficient medical

care to the accident victims.

“The very definition of a disaster is that there’s

chaotic, unconfirmed information,” says OEM

Director Barb Graff. “Trying to get your arms around

whether you got ahold of everybody is no small task.

But the Network made it so easy on us.”

Exercises conducted through the years had identified

a need for a standard way to track patients through

the healthcare system in a mass casualty incident. In

response to this gap, the Network began the

implementation of WATrac, a web-based application

that includes a patient tracking system. Within two

hours of the bus crash, the Network launched the

first disaster activation of WATrac, asking hospitals to

input basic demographic information about the

patients and update their status as they moved

through the continuum of care.

In A Disaster

The work of the coalition allows healthcare in our community to:

• Distribute patients to the appropriate hospitals

• Track patients’ location and conditions

• Use a single point of contact for healthcare information

• Anticipate medical facilities’ resource needs

IMPACT STORY: PATIENT TRACKING IN RESPONSE TO FATAL SEATTLE BUS CRASH



Family ReunificationThe patient tracking system also allowed Public

Health-Seattle & King County (PHSKC), the local

health department, to provide information to families

who called into its Family Reunification Hotline, which

received more than 70 calls in the two days following

the accident. “We could not have operated the call

center without the patient tracking piece,” says

Response Planning Program Manager Ashley

Kelmore. “We wouldn’t have had the information to

effectively respond to the callers.”

Trying to get your arms around whether you got ahold of everybody is no small task. But the Network made it so easy on us.”

Barb Graff,Director, Seattle Office of Emergency Management

availability of the components and what restocking might be needed,” he says.

PHSKC Preparedness Director Carina Elsenboss,

who has worked in healthcare preparedness in the

Puget Sound for more than 12 years, says the

patient tracking system made a “night and day”

difference compared to the many exercises she’s

participated in over the years in which there was

no central database of patient information.

Managing ResourcesThe patient tracking system also benefited non-hospital

healthcare organizations involved in regional

preparedness planning. Bloodworks Northwest, which

has been involved with the Network since its inception

as the King County Healthcare Coalition in 2005,

provides blood products and services to nearly 90

hospitals in Washington, Oregon and Alaska, had been

trained in the use of the WATrac patient tracking

system. After the accident, staff used the tool to

anticipate which healthcare facilities would likely need

blood products based on the listed patient conditions.

With this information, Bloodworks Northwest’s ability

to support the hospitals contrasted markedly with

the response to a shooting at Umpqua Community

College in Roseburg, Oregon, the following week,

says President and CEO Dr. Jim AuBuchon. “Even

though all the seriously injured patients in Roseburg

ended up at one facility that we serve, we had more

difficulty finding out the condition of the patients, the

likelihood of their need for transfusion, the

Addressing the GapsYet the incident also highlighted further work to be done, says the Network’s Western Washington Planning Support Coordinator Rebecca Lis. “It was an opportunity to test where we were, but also to reinforce what we can do,” Lis says. “It gave us momentum with the community and an understanding that this is something we all need to invest time in, and we’re on board with.” Since the accident, nearly all regional healthcare facilities have been trained in the use of WATrac’s patient tracking system.

At Seattle OEM, Graff has partnered with the Network for years in exercises and responses to infectious disease outbreaks and weather hazards. She says the city has come to rely on the Network and its tools like WATrac to be the voice for and liaison to the regional healthcare system in emergencies, a role no city department has the expertise or relationships to fill. “On our worst day, this is one thing we’ve taken care of that won’t go wrong for us,” she says. “The week that we were activated for the bus crash verified why it was vital to have that kind of a network and have a good working relationship with it. I think they proved their value in that activation.”

IMPACT STORY: PATIENT TRACKING IN RESPONSE TO FATAL SEATTLE BUS CRASH

About the Network




Preparing to care for children in a disaster

Children are particularly vulnerable during disasters and have different medical and

emotional needs than adults. Yet a 2006 study by the

Institute of Medicine (IOM) determined that most

hospitals in the United States were not prepared to

provide nuanced care for children in an emergency.

“People think they can go to any hospital and kids will

get the same care, and that’s just not true,” says

Carolyn Blayney, Program Manager for Pediatrics and

Burns at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center. “Kids

are not small adults. They come in all different shapes

and sizes, which means equipment has to be

different, medications are different, and how you talk

to them has to be different.”

Addressing a Gap in Service

In 2010, Mary King, the Director of Harborview’s

Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, and colleagues

partnered with the local healthcare coalition, now

known as the Northwest Healthcare Response

Network (the Network), to study the geographic

distribution of local pediatric resources. They found

that although about 78 percent of children in King

County live outside of the city of Seattle, more than

80 percent of pediatric healthcare resources—

hospital beds, doctors and nurses—are inside the

city. An earthquake of the magnitude Seattle is

predicted to experience in coming years would likely

damage the bridges that provide access to the city,

effectively cutting children off from the doctors and

facilities that are specifically trained to care for them.

“We have to think about how we’re going to get the

resources to those kids or the kids to the resources,

or at least better prepare everybody to take care of

kids, and feel they have a duty to do so,” King says.

In A DisasterThe work of the coalition allows healthcare in our community to:

• Access easy-to-use pediatric emergency medicine tools

• Utilize training on the nuances of caring for children

• Provide care for children at non-pediatric facilities

• Share best practices in pediatric preparedness and response to support other communities

Innovative Tools

To address this gap, the Network launched a Pediatric

Triage Task Force to develop tools and trainings to

prepare providers who typically see adults to care for

children. These resources are designed to build

capabilities that not only help during emergencies, but

also on a day-to-day basis since the IOM study

reported that 82 percent of pediatric visits to

emergency departments are to non-children’s

hospitals and departments. “Every hospital is going to

see children and every emergency room has to be

prepared for that,” says Dr. Vicki Sakata, the Network’s

Senior Medical Advisor and a physician at Mary Bridge

Children’s Hospital in Tacoma. “Preparedness practices

have to become part of everyday practice, not

something used only in a disaster.”

The Network’s Pediatric Disaster Toolkit encourages

non-children’s hospitals to identify pediatric champions

and provides resources like supply lists, strategies for

managing unaccompanied minors and job action sheets

to help staff understand their responsibilities in

disasters that affect children. They also include

templates of tools that Harborview has developed to

improve its own pediatric emergency care.

IMPACT STORY: TRAINING ALL PROVIDERS IN BASIC PEDIATRIC EMERGENCY CARE



“We are an adult hospital that takes care of kids,”

Blayney says. “Even though we’re a Level 1 Trauma

Center, they’re a small part of our population—we

admit 800 kids a year, but thousands of adults. It’s a

lot harder to stay good and keep interested in

pediatrics when you’re caring for adults all the time.”

Every hospital is going to see children and every emergency room has to be prepared for that.”

Dr. Vicki Sakata,Physician, Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital

Preparing the Region and Beyond

Since 2011, the Network has also conducted Pediatric

Disaster Response Workshops, providing

opportunities for more than 800 non-pediatric

clinicians and EMS personnel across Washington to

develop the skills and self-assurance to provide

better pediatric care. Lessons include use of the

Broselow® Tape, management of pediatric pain and

recognition of mental health challenges. “If you get

people up and start practicing things, it builds

confidence,” Sakata says.

Mason General Hospital in Shelton, Washington, saw

the value immediately. The weekend following a

Pediatric Disaster Workshop there in May 2016, a

pediatric patient came in to the emergency

department and the providers on shift used the

techniques they had just learned to quickly stabilize

and prepare the child for transfer to Mary Bridge. A

year later, Monitor Technician Mariah Pede says the

staff has continued to reap benefits from the training.

“We loved the tips regarding the Broselow® Tape and

exact dosing for medications,” she says. “It has made

for faster, more efficient pediatric care.”

The Pediatric Triage Task Force’s work has caught the

attention of others around the country, and the Network

has helped physicians in Oregon and California launch

their own workshops to make sure regional providers are

prepared to care for children in emergencies.

Representatives from the Network and Harborview have

presented their work nationally and contributed to the

development of the National Pediatric Disaster Coalition

and other initiatives dedicated to advancing care for

children in emergencies.

Harborview has developed a suite of easy-to-use

resources based on the internationally respected

Broselow® Tape, a color-coded system that measures

a child’s height and weight to determine size-

appropriate medication dosages and equipment.

Each child who comes into Harborview is tagged with

a bracelet printed in his or her Broselow ® color.

Since all pediatric supplies and medications stocked

in the hospital are labeled with color-coded stickers,

providers can quickly identify the right item for a

patient and use color-coded medication sheets to

determine appropriate dosing.

These innovative tools have spread beyond the

hospital. In summer 2016, the six King County

emergency medical service (EMS) agencies began

using cards with standard color-coded pediatric

dosing instructions and formularies that King helped

them develop to standardize care and eliminate the

need for risky on-the-spot calculations. “It takes out

10 steps and 10 chances for error to try to make it so

that when we resuscitate a child, we do it the same

way every time, and we do it the same way we do for

adults,” King says. After six months, the percentage

of paramedics who reported that they were

comfortable performing pediatric resuscitation had

increased from 24 to 33 percent.

IMPACT STORY: TRAINING ALL PROVIDERS IN BASIC PEDIATRIC EMERGENCY CARE

About the Network




Planning a communitywide response to acute infectious disease

As individuals, we create and test plans every day, usually without realizing it. Some

plans are simple, like scheduling a meeting with a

colleague. Other plans, such as organizing a potluck

dinner party, are a bit more complicated. If the

plan (in this case, an invitation) was adequately

scoped, clearly written and communicated, you

won’t end up with all desserts and no entrees.

And then there are far more complex plans. One

way the Network helps bolster the disaster

resiliency of the Puget Sound healthcare

community is to create, test and maintain

collaborative regional plans. Like the dinner party

plan, these plans must be well scoped and clearly

written to elicit the desired response. However,

unlike our potluck scenario, the Network doesn’t

wait for the event to test it. Instead, they approach

plan creation and testing as a progressive, multi-

year process, allowing for plan refinement and

mastery at each level before moving to the next.

Let’s take the Regional Acute Infectious Disease

(AID) Response Plan as an example.

In late 2014, the threat of the Ebola virus was circling

the globe. As Seattle is an international hub for travel,

commerce and tourism, there was justified concern

the virus could make its way to the Puget Sound

region. The Network responded by activating its

Healthcare Emergency Coordination Center to

support coordination and information sharing within

the healthcare community.

By January 2016, the Network had conducted research

and interviews with representatives from Public Health

Epidemiology in King and Pierce counties, Washington

State Department of Health Epidemiology, hospitals,

outpatient care, and emergency medical services. A

draft plan was created, input was gathered and gaps

were addressed. Attention could now turn to testing

the plan.

This activation was the catalyst to develop a regional

response plan to address not only Ebola, but the

broader category of acute infectious disease.

Specifically, the plan would define roles and

responsibilities of regional response agencies,

including healthcare, public health and other regional

and state partners for a coordinated regional

response related to the potential consequences of

an acute infectious disease outbreak.

In A Disaster

The work of the coalition allows our community to:

• Share information that supports crisis decision-making

• Address community-specific needs

• Quickly operationalize response plans

• Work collectively to solve common problems

IMPACT STORY: UNDERSTANDING REGIONAL HEALTHCARE RESPONSE CHALLENGES



The Testing Cycle

For the Network, testing typically starts with a plan

training, where key stakeholders are provided with the

plan background and overview. Next, those same

stakeholders participate in a tabletop exercise, which

involves talking through a scenario with the goal of

identifying gaps in the plan. Once those gaps are

addressed, a functional exercise is conducted and a

broader group of stakeholders play out a scenario,

often focusing on key parts of the plan with a goal of

resolving issues. Several functional exercises may

occur, depending on the readiness of the plan and

participating organizations. Lastly, if deemed

appropriate and resources are available, a full exercise

is conducted. In a full scale exercise, participants play

out larger events as if they are actually happening and

often include people role-playing as patients.

“Plan testing is often seen as a ‘walk, jog, run’ process, building in complexity and capability….it’s also a cycle of plan, train, exercise the plan and fix gaps.”

Rebecca Lis,Western Washington Planning Support Coordinator, NWHRN

Drawing from lessons learned at the tabletop

exercise, the Network created an improvement

plan with the input of their Acute Infectious

Disease Advisory Group, drove the development

of curriculum, and hosted the webinar-based

trainings to address gaps. The functional exercise

took place in August of 2017, and focused on

testing the decision-making and communications

protocol. The plan is ready to be activated by

public health or the Network when needed.

As there is great benefit in collaboratively

planning for a regional response before a disaster

strikes, the Network has created and maintains

several other plans, including:

• Regional Healthcare Situational

Awareness Procedure

• Regional Scarce Resource Management and

Crisis Standards of Care Concept of Operations

• Regional Patient Tracking Concept of Operations

• King & Pierce County Long-term Care

Mutual Aid Plan (LTC-MAP) for Evacuation

and Resource Sharing

The following plans are being updated:

• Regional Hospital Evacuation Plan

• Regional Healthcare System Emergency

Response Plan

Preparing as a Community

The Network hosted its AID plan training webinar in

February of 2016, followed by the discussion-based

tabletop exercise in April. Fifty participants from four

counties (King, Pierce, Snohomish, and Kitsap) and the

state were given an evolving scenario to react to and

discuss, resulting in collaborative conversations covering

AID screening processes, precautions, notification

coordination, operational protocol, laboratory protocol

and how to transfer a suspected AID patient.

About the Network


IMPACT STORY: UNDERSTANDING REGIONAL HEALTHCARE RESPONSE CHALLENGES

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