Emergency Department (ED) staff at Southend Hospital and Basildon Hospital have been practicing their emergency preparedness on site – an exercise that will help hospitals prepare for major incidents.
With hazmat suits and a protective tent having been set up, staff across Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust and its Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response team have run a full-scale Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear training exercise (CBRNe).
Having run this at Southend Hospital and Basildon Hospital, a similar exercise is also set to take place at Broomfield Hospital early next month to ensure that everyone is prepared in case of emergency.
Basildon Hospital team
Head of Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response Team at the Trust, Steve Arrowsmith, said: “We do this exercise at each of our main hospital sites every year and it’s about making sure our teams are confident, capable and ready to respond to anything – no matter how unlikely it may seem.”
“Our on-call commanders – the people who’d coordinate such a response if it happened in real life – walked through the entire response process in real time. This gave them valuable, hands-on insight to help build their situational awareness into how a major incident would unfold.”
The simulation is designed to test the Trust’s ability to respond to rare but high-risk incidents (such as a chemical or radiological incident), and in using these realistic scenarios where emergency teams put on hazmat suits, build decontamination shelters and run through live decontamination procedures, every hospital trust will ensure that they can practice and plan efficiently.
These tests were done at speed, where volunteer patients were triaged, stripped, and sent through the shelter, while clinicians ran through the full decontamination process. One key part of the day involved practicing how to don and doff hazmat suits safety – a vital skill in protecting both patients and staff during a real CBRNe incident.
Jennifer Marshall, Deputy Director of Nursing at Southend Hospital and on-call commander, said: “Exercises like this are a crucial part of emergency planning across the NHS. They allow clinical and operational teams to train side-by-side, in realistic conditions, and stay one step ahead.”
Southend Hospital team
The separate events that took place gave staff the chance to ask questions, troubleshoot problems and see how each part of the response fit together to ensure a smooth and seamless protocol would take place if needs be.
