Tuesday, July 10, 2007
By Jeffery Kurz

MERIDEN — It’s a question that seems obvious only after it’s been asked. In the case of a disaster, who takes care of the people entrusted to take care of people?
MidState Medical Center has been taking that question very seriously. The hospital has been focusing on its employees as it tries to envision and accommodate emergency preparedness plans.
MidState recently held a major disaster drill, involving police and fire departments from its three major communities, Meriden, Wallingford and Cheshire, as well the state Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security.
The drill, which involved more than 400 people, envisioned an outbreak of pandemic flu. The aim was to test responses to a demand in care well beyond the typical. That included handling a sudden surge in patients. The patients were portrayed by volunteers from the nearby Village at Kensington.
While organizers say they were pleased with how the drill played out, a more complete evaluation will be made in early August.
Planning for any such disaster, whether man-made or natural, must take into account the needs of the people handling the response, who after all may be just as affected by a disaster as the patients they’re treating. If they’re too busy worrying about things at home, for example, they’re not going to be able to perform as well.
So the question was, what would they be worrying about? This is not as easily answered as one might suppose. People who work in health care are accustomed to focusing on patients, not themselves.
“Typically, in most disaster plans, they focus on the medical aspect, and I was always concerned with what was happening with the staff,” said Claudia Ferrara, MidState’s manager for social work services.
About a year ago, Judy Guccione, MidState’s director of health information management and chairwoman of the hospital’s emergency management committee, took on the task of helping staff prepare for disasters that everyone hopes will not arrive. In initial interviews, she found out that people were worried about their fellow employees and the stress involved with taking care of patients under extraordinary circumstances.
“That was very loud and clear,” she said. “That stress factor — they wanted it to be relieved.”
Focus groups were formed to find out, Guccione said, “What would it take to make you feel comfortable staying at MidState?”
Some responses were predictable. Family members, particularly children and the elderly, topped the list of concerns. But the level of concern for pets came as a surprise. That concern included not just household pets, but other animals, like chickens, that might be left at home.
“Their animals were one of the biggest, believe it nor not,” Guccione said.
During the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans, people were unwilling to leave their pets, even for their own safety, Ferrara noted. “It really is a very critical piece,” she said.
Ferrara is chairwoman of the staff and family support subcommittee, which is starting to put together emergency plans based on the responses of employees. That will include plans for child and elderly care, and pets.
“We’re still in the baby stage,” said Ferrara, “and we’re realizing that our baby stage is passed what a lot of places have done.”
The hospital’s communications department has also set up an intranet, or in-house network, on which employees can list information about loved ones, including Social Security numbers, medical conditions and medications. There’s also a section for pets. The hospital also provides information to help employees prepare children for the eventuality of an emergency.
“We need to educate our staff,” said Guccione. “We want to make sure that we’re really prepared for our community.”
Emergency preparedness planning is also offered to the public via the hospital’s Web site, at www.midstatemedical.org.
In a sense, hospitals have always had to plan for emergencies. The anticipation of so-called Y2K problems, or the vulnerability of information systems when the clocks tripped over the year 2000, helped bring concerns to the fore.
“But after 9/11 it really hit home for everyone,” Guccione said.
MidState participates in a federal emergency preparedness program, administered by the state department of Public Health, and receives a two-year, $120,000 grant for its efforts. The hospital will train 18 employees for a critical incident stress-management team, Guccione said, that will help the mental and behavioral health of fellow workers in an emergency.
The hospital keeps a trailer in which there are enough supplies for hospital staff to last up to two weeks, should the hospital have to be quarantined. There’s also a closet that houses information and preparedness protocols for emergency response leadership. It includes telephones that operate on a different circuit. That equipment got its first testing during MidState’s recent drill.
MidState was the first hospital in the state to hold such a drill with the state Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security, Guccione said.
Such preparation aims to make responding to extraordinary situations seem routine.
“When you’re under tension, you want simplicity,” Guccione said. All the preparation helps when it comes to more minor emergencies as well, she noted.