State of Emergency: Are Hennepin Healthcare, county ME prepared for large-scale emergencies?
MINNEAPOLIS — Agencies in Hennepin County train together with dispatch, EMS, police and fire to help prepare them to better respond when there's the potential for people being hurt.
What about the people that need help? How prepared is Hennepin Healthcare to handle multiple patients at once? And what about the medical examiner's office? Senior Investigative Reporter Jennifer Mayerle explores what's in place should the unthinkable happen here.
Any given day, first responders rush patients to the emergency department at Hennepin Healthcare.
The level one trauma center does drills to get ready for the unknown disaster, surging the ED with patients, played by high school students.
"We like to talk about space, staff and stuff or supplies. So, if we get inundated to the point where it overwhelms our capacities and our capabilities that would result in a mass casualty incident. So anything that would overwhelm us would then activate the mass casualty incident when we pull that lever, we're bringing in folks from off campus to come support us," said Seth Jones, Emergency Preparedness Program Manager at Hennepin Healthcare.
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Jones' job is to think of everything. They stand up the hospital incident command system during a disaster. People who meet in there make sure the hospital has what it needs. He says communication continues to be something they work on. And they've done drills with blood banks too, which can be in demand depending on the disaster.
"These events have happened. Whether it's Pulse nightclub shooting, the shooting out in Las Vegas. And we always keep track of best practices. Lessons learned from these incidents because these are continuing to happen," Jones said.
Should an event take a more tragic turn, Hennepin County Medical Examiner Dr. Andrew Baker says his office is ready.
"Within hours, we can turn this garage into a mass fatality processing morgue," Baker said.
Baker has experience with disaster. He responded to the war in Kosovo, 9/11 and deployed during Hurricane Katrina. His office handled the identification and autopsies of the I-35W bridge collapse victims.
He says they had those people in the back of their minds as they built a new multi-million dollar office.
"One of the things we intentionally baked into our garage was enough power outlets so that we could have fingerprint specialists, personal effects specialists, anthropologists, forensic dentists. We can power all their workstations right here within our building. We have two loading docks to which we can fix refrigerated trucks. We have enough space on the property that we could put pop-up style hospital-type tents that are climate-controlled," Baker said.
And he says a state-of-the art CT scanner is critical if the disaster involves something like a shooting, where it can detect bullets.
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"Every medical examiner lays awake at night wondering what they would do if the next mass disaster was in their community. You have to plan for that. You have to train for that. You have to drill for it. And then, of course, like everyone, you hope that you never really use it," Baker said.
Hennepin Healthcare says it continually evaluates its training and updates it with best practices.
The next big training is in June, where they'll also work on family reunification.