Overview - The University of Georgia (UGA) designed a statewide functional
exercise program to test the ability of 149 hospitals to interactively
participate in a single exercise. In addition to improving the
emergency readiness of all the hospitals involved, the exercise enabled
the State of Georgia Division of Public Health to demonstrate
compliance with HRSA requirements. Through a series of iterative
processes and readiness drills, the hospital system not only met their
requirements, but increased their ability to prepare for, respond to,
and recover from disasters of all kinds.
UGA
is currently making this proven program available to qualifying public
health departments and hospitals across the United States. Here is a
brief description of the November UGA exercise, and key deliverables
for the packaged exercise offering.
Objectives:
The Exercise had a number of objectives, including to test:
- Surge capacity for each hospital
- The ability to determine isolation requirements and effectively provide isolation during a widespread pandemic
- Each hospitals ability to communicate with their regional hospital, as well as overall technological (computer software) emergency communications systems
- The usage of the Incident Command System within each of the participating hospitals Emergency Operations Centers
Challenges:
Every exercise has its challenges, but this one had an abundance, with
special challenges stemming from a coincidence of time and
scope-related issues, including:
- Short timeframe - We had to develop a statewide exercise in a 9 week timeframe and condense the exercise timeframe into 3 month cycles
- Customized reporting - Provide detailed patient impact data to each participating hospital
- Cost - Reduce cost by creating a repeatable and scaleable process
- Relevance - produce a meaningful exercise that incentives hospitals to build a process that enables community based partnerships (military, Public Health, hospitals) to train, exercise and test health readiness
- Execution - Provide a delivery system that trains hundreds of evaluators and controllers and creates functional roles and an incident command structure
- Managing change - Adapt requirements to changing scenario and adjust injects at the last minute due to a 1/3 reduction in available exercise time
Accomplishments:
The value of the UGA exercise was that it provided the opportunity to
build a repeatable offering of the human resources, process, tools and
technology that can be easily scaled to larger and smaller
environments, be deployed in faster timeframes, and provide continuous
feedback.
A number of impressive outcomes and deliverables more accomplished from the UGA exercise, such as:
- Reduced cost by 35% from expected budget
- Developed predictive CBRNE and Flu models that enabled each hospital to understand their resource demands including patient surge, isolation needs, communications, and security.
- Developed and deployed an integrated learning management system and an incident command system for the exercise
- Built enhanced templates for mutual aid and volunteer programs
- Created operational plans and tools:
- Project plan and schedules
- Website
- Registration process
- Orientations
- Training platforms
- Evaluation methods
- Certifications
- Modeling tools
- Simulation tools
- Command tools
- Continuous improvement process
- MSEL for CBRNE and Flu Pandemic
- Multi-media development
- EEG objective matrix
Conclusions:
We have built a scaleable, portable, exercise offering that includes
the people, process, partnerships, tools and technology to not just
meet HRSA requirements, but to significantly upgrade the readiness of
health departments and hospitals and the entire statewide hospital
system.
Our comprehensive framework captures the best of breed practices from
other specialized organizations (i.e. Biosecurity, CDC, AMA), while
allowing you to design, create, modify, localize, train and run
exercises on a repeatable basis at a local, state, or federal levels.
Our packaged exercise offering includes a range of professional and
consulting services, pre-configured software (with core data
pre-loaded), a full range of operational plans and tools, tailored
exercise scenarios, and a comprehensive learning management system.
We welcome the opportunity to get to know you better, and assist you in any way we can.