Exercise helps hospitals prepare for major incidents
With the hazmat suits and protective tent, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d walked onto a film set, or a major medical incident, but fear not it’s hospital staff practicing their emergency preparedness.
Emergency Department (ED) staff across the Trust and its Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response team ran a full-scale Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear training exercise (CBRNe) at Southend Hospital and Basildon Hospital, with a similar exercise set to take place at Broomfield Hospital early next month.
The simulation is designed to test the Trust's ability to respond to rare but high-risk incidents, such as a chemical or radiological incident. Using realistic scenarios, emergency teams put on hazmat suits, built decontamination shelter, and ran through live decontamination procedures. Every hospital trust must make sure they practice and plan for such incidents so they can respond properly if such an event occurs.
Staff from ED practiced assembling the decontamination tent at speed. Volunteer patients were triaged, stripped, and sent through the shelter, while clinicians ran through the full decontamination process.
One key part of the day involved practicing how to don and doff hazmat suits safely - a vital skill in protecting both patients and staff during a real CBRNe incident.
Steve Arrowsmith, Head of Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response Team at the Trust, said: “We do this exercise at each of our main hospital sites every year and it’s about making sure our teams are confident, capable and ready to respond to anything - no matter how unlikely it may seem.”
“Our on-call commanders – the people who’d coordinate such a response if it happened in real life - walked through the entire response process in real time. This gave them valuable, hands-on insight to help build their situational awareness into how a major incident would unfold.”
One of those was Jennifer Marshall, Deputy Director of Nursing at Southend Hospital, who said: “Exercises like this are a crucial part of emergency planning across the NHS. They allow clinical and operational teams to train side-by-side, in realistic conditions, and stay one step ahead.”
The separate event at each site gave staff the chance to ask questions, troubleshoot problems, and see how each part of the response fits together.