Importance of Practicing Your Emergency Preparedness Plan
St. Clare Newport, a CCRC in Rhode Island, successfully evacuated all 87 of its residents last week when it lost its heat amid a regional gas outage, during single digit temperatures. McKnight’s covered the article with the headline, “’This could have been a nightmare’ – evacuation plan succeeds during LTC facility’s gas disaster.” In addition to planning for natural disasters, staff and facilities must be prepared for other emergencies, such as pandemics, influenza, active shooters and more.
All emergency situations must be handled swiftly, diligently and with the utmost care for staff and patients. The Rhode Island continuing care retirement community had prepared for such circumstances previously, running drills twice a year. Click here to read the full story.
Emergency Preparedness Tips
In addition to implementing your emergency preparedness plan procedures, consider the following:
- Plan times for providing regular updates to your residents, families, and staff.
- Keep your emergency plan accessible, organized and clearly labeled.
- If you need to activate the LTC Mutual Aid Plan (LTC-MAP) for your center, call your designated Regional Health Care Coalition contact to request the resources you need:
- Central Virginia Healthcare Coalition: (800) 276-0683
- Eastern Virginia Healthcare Coalition: (844) 757-7422
- Far Southwest Healthcare Coalition: (888) 262-6498
- Near Southwest Preparedness Alliance: (866) 679-7422
- Northern Virginia Hospital Alliance: (888) 987-7422
- Northwest Region Healthcare Coalition: (855) 469-7422
- Use the Virginia Healthcare Alerting Status System (VHASS) to update your center’s status or to request help.
Evacuations
In the event you need to evacuate your center:
- Keep a log of the other centers you contacted including:
- Name and contact information for the person with whom you spoke.
- Confirmation of the signed LTC-MAP MOU. (Per the DMAS Medicaid Memo – Reimbursement for Individual Evacuated from a Disaster Struck Nursing Facility Due to Temporary Emergencies, the MOU is an acceptable contract.)
- Number of beds available for receiving evacuated residents.
- Date of Transfer.
- Notify the Office of Licensure and Certification (OLC) about Facility Reported Incidents (FRI).
- Use the FRI form to notify OLC of any unusual occurrences such as a utility failure/power outage.
- If evacuating residents, the Disaster Struck Facility (DSF) must notify OLC upon transfer to the Resident Accepting Facility (RAF) and upon return to the DSF. Use the FRI for Evacuations in these instances.
- Completed FRI forms should be emailed to creegan-tedeschi@vdh.virginia.gov or faxed to (804) 527-4503.
VHCA-VCAL and AHCA/NCAL both have dedicated webpages page with emergency preparedness resources to assist you.
Additional Resources