Prepare Hospital First Receivers for Mass Casualty Incidents

The Hospital First Receivers series is now available in Video On Demand. The four-part series, designed for hospital personnel, covers the various steps in handling a mass casualty incident. This series helps you to meet JCAHO and OSHA standards, and provides you with the means to handle mass casualty disasters if they occur.

The first course covers recognizing contaminated patients, based on the different types of contaminants and health outcomes they create. Personnel must be able to recognize contaminated patients as they come in, so the proper precautions and procedures can take place.

The second course explains the Hospital Incident Command System . Personnel learn about the various elements of HICS, key positions in the system, the Hospital Command Center and control zones. Understanding the chain of command and the organization of efforts helps make incident response run smoother.

Next, the third part of the series details self-protection, via the proper use and selection of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). Depending on the type of contaminants involved in the incident different self-protection equipment is necessary. It is crucial for responders to protect themselves, as mass casualty incidents don’t need additional victims.

Finally, the series wraps up with a course on patient decontamination. As proper decontamination may not be able to be completed at the scene of an incident, hospital personnel must be prepared to execute a decontamination system. This course includes information creating a plan for decontamination, as well as how to implement the decontamination process and what to do post-decontamination.

The more prepared hospital personnel are for the possibility of handling  patients from a mass casualty incident, the better the outcomes will be should a catastrophe occur.