During Hurricane Katrina in 2005, hundreds of patients presented to local hospitals seeking care. Resources were rapidly depleted, resulting in community chaos at hospitals, stadiums, airports and other public facilities.
Later reviews found that caregivers were not adequately prepared and that lack of training unnecessarily increased mortality.
The situation is not helped by the absence of a national standard that provides emergency preparedness training curricula for health workers in the U.S. Thousands of courses exist in many jurisdictions, all trying to accomplish overlapping goals.
That may change, with the introduction of the Center for Health Professional Training and Emergency Response at the Medical University of South Carolina. CHPTER provides a blueprint for how to establish national training standards using local and regional resources and stakeholders.
The current situation wastes time and resources.
“There are many trees but no forest,” said Lancer Scott, MD, a professor of emergency medicine and director of CHPTER.
Scott told Homeland1 that CHPTER looked beyond the trees and created a forest. Essentially, CHPTER is the culmination of all stakeholders sitting down and deciding what they want achieve with disaster training in their region.
Scott believes CHPTER may serve as a model for other regions seeking to improve care provider emergency preparedness training programs.
“It’s working here and we think it can work elsewhere,” Scott said.
Scott said one problem is existing emergency preparedness training courses lack standards for measuring trainee performance.
Most courses are nothing more than drive-by training – they just dump a bunch of information on folks and that’s it,” he said.
If there is a drill like a mass casualty exercise, Scott said few courses actually measure performance of trainees during the drill, the result being that scarce federal and state support funds are being wasted.
Scott said federal expenditures on emergency preparedness training for patient care providers is dwindling and the healthcare industry has failed to step up and commit significant funds to get healthcare employees trained. Plus, caregivers have a difficult time taking 2-5 days off to attend training courses on their own.
CHPTER provides a way to deliver affordable, robust emergency preparedness training in one 5-8 hour course.
“If your end goal is to save lives, performance is everything,” Scott said. Scott said measuring human performance to save lives in chaotic environments is CHPTER’s specialty.
“Our published performance data shows that our trainees, which range from students to experts, are successful in saving lives,” Scott said.