Practice Management Alert

Know how to balance realistic-feeling drills with patient safety.

You know that having an emergency preparedness plan is crucial, but how realistic do you need to be when practicing drills for various situations? If, for example, you had a fire in your office during regular business hours, everyone, including patients, would evacuate. Make sure your on-paper plans and emergency protocols are up to snuff, and make sure your staff know their individual responsibilities.

“In the 2011-2015 period, United States fire departments responded to an annual average of 620 fires per year in clinics or doctors’ offices. These fires caused an average of 8 civilian injuries and $26.5 million in direct property damage,” says Richard Campbell, senior research analyst at National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), in a 2017 report.

The majority of the fires that clinics or physician offices faced were due to equipment that most offices have: cooking, electrical distribution and lighting, and heating, accounted for 36 percent, 15 percent, and 10 percent, respectively, with the electrical distribution and lighting equipment causing 38 percent of the direct property damage, Campbell says. While everyone thinks that a fire or some other catastrophe “could never happen to me,” take heed of the statistics and make sure you treat the potential of a fire in your office as a real possibility.

Fire Drills Can Save Lives

You know the importance of having an emergency preparedness plan that fully evaluates various risks, including fire.

“While fires themselves are dangerous enough, the threat can be compounded by panic and chaos if your company is unprepared. The best way to prevent this from happening is to have a detailed and rehearsed fire evacuation plan,” says AlertMedia, a two-way mass communications company in Austin, Texas.

Your plan should include roles and responsibilities for staff members, and you should hold drills to make sure each person knows what she needs to do in a situation. AlertMedia suggests assigning the following roles for fires:

• a team member in charge of all planning and preparation,
• a team member in charge of communications (including calling the fire department),
• a team member who is responsible that all routes are clear and evacuation is orderly, and
• a team member who knows she will be the last one out after making sure the office is clear.

Make Sure Staff Understand Responsibilities

Once you have a plan in place, it’s crucial to make sure each employee knows her role and how to fulfill all responsibilities in the potential chaos of a fire. Practicing evacuation through a fire drill is a time-tested means of ironing out any potential wrinkles before an emergency actually occurs. However, you may be wondering exactly how realistic you should make your drills, especially because, if you were to have a fire break out, you could have patients in your office.

“Typically, we find that most of our customers choose not to hold fire drills with patients in the office. It can confuse or startle them, and the same patients who would participate in a drill will likely not be there if there’s an actual fire,” says Alex Vacarro, vice president of marketing at AlertMedia in Austin, Texas.

Ensuring that staff know their roles and responsibilities is the most important endeavor, because staff are who will be managing your office’s response.

“The staff need to build muscle memory and understand the plan, not the patients. That said, most offices choose to rehearse with stand-ins ‘playing’ patients so that the staff know what to do and is ready to lead if an actual fire were to occur. In the Army, they use civilian role-players so the soldiers get training on how to react to real, live people,” she says.

Know Everyone’s Location

Schools do fire drills so frequently to help students have “muscle memory” in getting to the safe location. The chaos of a fire means that people may not be acting and reacting with predictable behavior, so your planning and preparation should focus on keeping evacuation calm, orderly, and thorough.

Some offices choose to mitigate the risk of a breakdown in communications — including, even, whether an evacuation is just a drill or is necessitated by a real fire — by using specialty software designed to send out information simultaneously over multiple channels.

“The tool helps them communicate ahead of the drill to their emergency team and then lets the entire organization know during the alarm that this is a drill. They then use our two-way communication capability to account for everyone’s location during the drill (or an actual emergency) to ensure everyone has evacuated safely,” Vaccaro says.