NURS 4060 Disaster Recovery Plan Assessment 3

NURS 4060 Disaster Recovery Plan Assessment 3

I have to Develop and record a 10 slides power point presentation with speaker notes of a disaster recovery plan base on the Vila Health Disaster Recovery Scenario (details of the scenario begins in page 2)  to lessen health disparities and improve access to community services after a disaster. The presentation will be presented to the Mayor, the Vila Health system, city officials, and the disaster relief team. In this assessment, you are a member of a community task force responsible for developing a disaster recovery plan for the Vila Health community using MAP-IT, which you will present to city officials and the disaster relief team. A comprehensive recovery plan, guided by the MAP-IT (Mobilize, Assess, Plan, Implement, Track) framework, is essential to help ensure everyone’s safety.

Instructions

Complete the following:

1. Develop a disaster recovery plan for the Vila Health community that will lessen health disparities and improve access to services after a disaster. Refer back to the Vila Health: Disaster Recovery Scenario to understand the Vila Health community.

1. • Assess community needs.
   • Consider resources, personnel, budget, and community makeup.
   • Identify the people accountable for implementation of the plan and describe their roles.
   • Focus on specific Healthy People 2020 goals.
   • Include a timeline for the recovery effort.

2. Use the MAP-IT (Mobilize, Assess, Plan, Implement, Track) framework to guide the development of your plan:

Mobilize collaborative partners.

Assess community needs.

Plan to lessen health disparities and improve access to services.

Implement a plan to reach Healthy People 2020 objectives.

Track community progress.

3. Develop a slide presentation of your disaster recovery plan with an audio recording of you presenting your assessment of the Vila Health: Disaster Recovery Scenario for city officials and the disaster relief team. Be sure to also include speaker notes.
4. Cite at least three credible sources from peer-reviewed journals or professional industry publications within the past 5 years to support your plan. One of the resources must be from Healthy People 2020 website.

The requirements outlined below correspond to the grading criteria in the scoring guide, so be sure to address each point: Please make sure all this points are discussed in the power point or speaker notes.

Describes the determinants of health and the cultural, social, and economic barriers that impact safety, health, and disaster recovery efforts in a community.

Explains how a proposed disaster recovery plan will lessen health disparities and improve access to community services.

Explains how health and governmental policy impact disaster recovery efforts.

Presents specific, evidence-based strategies to overcome communication barriers and enhance interprofessional collaboration to improve disaster recovery efforts.

Presents a compelling professional, well-organized, and engaging case to community stakeholders to obtain their approval and support for a proposed disaster recovery plan with audio/speaker notes that were unclear and hard to understand.

Vila Health Disaster Recovery Scenario

In this scenario, you will resume your role as the senior nurse at Valley City Regional Hospital. Like many facilities within the Vila Health network, Valley City Regional serves as the primary source of health care for a wide area of North Dakota. As such, it is even more imperative than usual that it stay open and operational in all situations. Doing this means planning and preparation.

The administrator of the hospital, Jennifer Paulson, wants to talk to you about disaster preparedness and recovery at Valley City Regional. But first, you should read some background information about events in Valley City in the past few years, including the involvement of the hospital.

Article – HOPE FOR THE BEST, PLAN FOR THE WORST

Op-ed by Anne Levy, Valley City Herald

Valley City has had a great year, growing on a number of fronts. But all of our growth and success exists in the shadow of the recent past, a case of recent wounds slowly healing and fading to scars.

No one who was in Valley City two years ago will ever forget the catastrophic derailment of an oil-tanker train and the subsequent explosion and fire. While fatalities were fewer than they could have been, six residents of our city lost their lives. Nearly two hundred were hospitalized, and much of the city was temporarily evacuated. Several homes near the railroad tracks were leveled, and our water supply was contaminated by oil leakage for several months.

Life has resumed, and we have begun to thrive again, in our fashion. But the nagging feeling recurs: When the disaster struck, were our institutions properly prepared? No one wakes up in the morning expecting a train derailment, of course. But responsible institutions think about things that could go wrong within the realm of possibility, and make a plan. Many individuals performed brave, inspired, selfless service in the chaos of the derailment, but it is clear in retrospect that much of the work was improvised, disorganized, and often circular or at cross-purposes.

For the first two hours of the crisis, the Valley City Fire Department was caught unprepared by the damage to the city water supply caused by the explosion, which was more extensive than had been considered possible. The Fire and Police departments had trouble coordinating radio communications, and a clear chain of command at the scene between departments was painfully slow to emerge. The hospital was woefully understaffed for the first six hours of the crisis, taking far too long to find a way to bring additional staff and resources onto the scene. The city health department was unacceptably dilatory in testing the municipal water supply for contaminants.

A call from the Herald’s offices to City Hall confirmed that the city’s disaster plan is over a decade old, and is unfortunately myopic both in the events it considers as possible disasters and in the agencies it plans for. It is of utmost importance to the future of our city that this plan be revised, revisited, and expanded. All city agencies should review their own disaster plans and coordinate with the city for a master plan. The same goes for crucial non-government agencies, most especially the Valley City Regional Hospital. Of course, this all exists in the shadow of budget cuts both at city hall and the hospital.

The sun is shining today, without a cloud in the sky. This is the time to make sure we are ready for the next storm, so to speak, to hit our city. No one knows what the next crisis will be or when it will come. But we can count on the fact that no one will get up that morning expecting it.

Fact Sheet – Valley City, ND, Demographics

Population: 8,295 (up from 6,585 in 2010 census)

Median Age: 43.6 years. 17.1% under age 18; 14.8% between 18 and 24; 21.1% between 25 and 44; 24.9% 46 – 64; 22% 65 or older.

Officially, residents are 93% white, 3% Latino, 2% African-American, 1% Native American, 1% other.

—additionally, unknown number of undocumented migrant workers with limited English proficiency

Special needs: 204 residents are elderly with complex health conditions; 147 physically disabled and/or use lip-reading or American Sign Language to communicate.

Note that the Valley City Homeless shelter runs at capacity and is generally unable to accommodate all of the city’s homeless population. Also, the city is in the midst of a financial crisis, with bankruptcy looming, and has instituted layoffs at the police and fire departments.

Valley City Region Hospital Fact Sheet

105-bed hospital (currently 97 patients; 5 on ventilators, 2 in hospice care.)

NOTEWORTHY: Both of VCRH’s ambulances are aging and in need of overhaul. Also, much of the hospital’s basic infrastructure and equipment is old and showing wear. The hospital has run at persistent deficits and has been unable to upgrade; may be looking at downsizing nursing staff.

Jennifer Paulson

Administrator, Valley City Hospital

Hello, thanks for stopping by. I hope you’re settling in well.

I’d been planning on talking to you about disaster planning in the near future anyway, but now it looks like it’s a lot more urgent. I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but the National Weather Service says we’re going to be at an elevated risk for severe tornadoes in Valley City this season. I’m taking that as a clear sign that it’s time we get serious about disaster planning. And it’s not just me… The mayor just called me and asked the hospital to check our preparedness for a mass-casualty event, given recent qualms about the way the derailment was handled. For instance, did you see that op-ed in the paper about disaster planning?

Anyway. My particular concern is patient triage in the near term and recovery efforts over the next six months. As I work on a more formal response to the Mayor about where we’re at for this threat, I’d appreciate it if you could do some research and planning on this matter. Even if we dodge the bullet on these tornadoes, there’ll be something else in the future. We need to stop putting it off and get serious about our disaster planning.

What I’d like for you to do first is take some time to talk to a good cross-section of people here at the hospital about what happened last time, and about our disaster plan in general. Make sure you get people from administration as well as frontline care staff; after all, problems can be visible in one area but not another a lot of times. So spread it around! Since you weren’t here for the train crisis, I think you’re in a unique position to have a fresh, unbiased outlook on it. Actually, first you might find it useful to take a look at the hospital fact sheet, just to brush up on our basics here.

After you’ve looked at the fact sheet and done some talking to people, I’d like you to swing back by and we’ll talk about next steps.

Thanks!

Staff Interview

Kate McVeigh

RN

I just remember a big jumble. We had waves of people coming in before we were really aware of what we were up against. Someone actually brought out the disaster plan but it was kind of useless. Just a bunch of words about using resources wisely and what have you, no concrete steps or plan. And then people started pouring in and we started treating them and there just wasn’t time to figure out how to make that stuff about using resources wisely into an actual, concrete plan. I mean, of course it’s good advice to use your damned resources wisely in an emergency! But just saying that doesn’t help. Without a plan, we were just working our way through a line, or really more like a crowd, without any thought of triage or priorities or anything. You knew as you were doing it that it was bad, but what could you do? There was always a next person to help.You know what would have been useful in that damn disaster plan? Strict, functional checklists and lists of steps and such. Concrete plans for a chain of command. Clear lists of what to do and what our priorities should have been. And I’m just talking doctor and nurse time here, as far as waste goes. I know we had critical problems with supplies and such, but I was too focused on patient care to really know what was going on there.

Courtney Donovan M.D.

I know we keep talking about doing something, but it never seems to get any further than talk. I mean, no offense, but I think this is the third time since the derailment that someone has tried to talk to me about lessons learned. There’s a point where just that repetition makes it clear that no lessons have been learned. The big lesson from the derailment is that our staff is intelligent, resourceful, energetic, and flexible. That’s the good news. Stuck with a horrific situation and a disaster plan that I’d describe as “aspirational,” we got through a very rough event. It was more painful than it needed to be, since we had to improvise most of it and improvisation is never the most efficient way to do things. But we provided real help to people and I think we kept the loss of life admirably low. But God. There was no structure, no thought to anything. I tried to get the nurses to perform some triage, but they were too busy reacting to the latest mini-crisis to pop up in front of them. I don’t blame them, of course! I tried to give some orders, but then like the nurses I was always pulled in to sit with the next patient, and someone else would come out and countermand whatever I’d said, and it just went on like that all night. On a personal level, I know I pushed myself too hard that night. I mean, with good reason, but still. I was exhausted and loopy after 14 hours or so, and it’s just luck that I didn’t make any serious medical errors. I’m not the only one who put it all out there. I know most of the medical staff were in bad shape towards the end, too.

Mike Horgan Associate Director Hospital Operations

I have been screaming about the need to update our disaster plan for years. I was screaming about it before the train incident, too, but nobody would listen then. I respect the heck out of Jen Paulson, she’s been a great hospital administrator. But she’s also got a lot on her plate, and is never, ever able to properly take a step back and look at the big picture. Not her fault, it’s a systemic thing. We can and should have a plan. But when the stuff hits the fan, we’re not on our own and we can’t work from a plan that pretends we are. We interface directly with first responders: the fire department, the EMTs, and the police and sheriff’s departments. Our plan needs to coordinate with them. We saw that in spades on the night of the train explosion. We barely had functional communication with any of the other agencies for the first few hours of the crisis! People were being brought over by the ambulance load and just kind of dumped off so that they could go pick up the next wave! There was a serious problem with understandably panicked people crowding the hospital, mostly trying to find out where their loved ones were and if they were OK, and it was three in the morning before we had police here doing crowd control.

Andrew Steller Hospital CFO

Sorry. It’s just that this is kind of a tough stretch, since the budget realities we’re facing make everything extra difficult and fraught. I understand the importance of planning for the next disaster. It’s just that this is one more thing that our shortfalls are going to make really, really difficult. It’s looking pretty likely that we’re going to need to cut our nursing staff pretty soon. Aside from the day-to-day problems that’ll cause, it’ll have a huge impact in a disaster. The impact, especially long-term, doesn’t affect everyone equally. Think about any kind of special-needs population: people who don’t speak English, people with grave health problems who need ongoing care, people with serious economic problems Those people are going to be affected up-front at least as much, if not more than, the baseline population, but then their recovery is going to be that much harder. You see it with health impact, economic impact, even physical impact. If you were a little bit behind before, you’ll be a bit further behind after. We need, as both a moral and legal imperative, to provide equal access and service for all of the different parts of a diverse community. And again, we’ll be facing that situation with reduced capacity. Another thing that’s going to be a factor in our post-disaster recovery is government. Does FEMA step in? How long do they stay? Is there a disaster declaration, with some recovery funding? How about at the state level? Who’s coordinating all of this? This sort of thing requires a ton of communication and collaboration with governmental entities at all levels. We like to pretend we’re autonomous in these situations but we aren’t at all. There’s always a minefield of government funding and health policy to dig through as we try to put ourselves back together.

Anthony Martinez Director, Facilities

Yeah, it’d be good to have a disaster plan. It’s hard to do in real life, when you’re trapped by the realities of a budget cycle. You know? Whatever we plan, whatever we think is the right thing to do for the long term, there’s also this reality that Vila Health HQ expects us to hit certain monetary targets and we have to not only factor that into any idea about disaster planning, but also have to focus on hitting those targets rather than sitting down and, you know, making a plan. I’d just started to build up some surplus supplies when that happened, nowhere near enough. We burned through supplies at a terrifying rate that night. Especially bandages and blood plasma. It didn’t help that the floor staff were just running around like crazy trying to treat people as they came in, not putting any thought into prioritizing who got what. I’m not blaming them, they were doing the best they could in a tough situation. But it meant that we were out of plasma for a while until Jackie Gifford from Fargo Methodist drove in with a truckload of replacements for us. It was like that all night, making frantic calls to hospitals and agencies all over the area, trying to get supplies. And keeping an eye on the fuel situation for the hospital generator, since the fire took out power for half the town.

Jennifer Paulson Administrator, Valley City Hospital

Thanks for talking to everyone! I bet you heard a lot. I’d like you to take some time to sit and think about what you’ve heard and seen, and try to knit it all together into some overall conclusions that we can use to work up a plan to be ready for the next disaster.

Ultimately, I’d like you to be able to present a compelling case to community stakeholders (mayor and city disaster relief team) to obtain their approval and support for the proposed disaster recovery plan. I’d like you to use MAP-IT, and work up an approach supported by Healthy People 2020, and put it all into a PowerPoint. We’ll save the PowerPoint deck and the audio of its accompanying presentation at the public library so that the public can access it and see that we’re serious. Ideally, I’d like this to be used as a prototype for other local communities near Valley City, and possibly other facilities in the Vila Health organization.