Imagine you have taken your child to the Emergency Department because of a serious illness. You learned that besides taking care of your child and other sick children, the Department staff are also participating in an “exercise,” some make-believe game, testing their ability to treat victims of some disaster. Wait! Don’t they know how to treat disaster victims? Why are they playing in this game? And why today, my family’s worst day ever?
It turns out, they usually do know how to treat these victims when they show up one or two at a time, but treating dozens, or even hundreds, of patients can be a very different challenge.
Emergency departments (EDs) conduct regular emergency preparedness drills for exactly this reason. These exercises aren’t just games—they're vital to ensuring we are ready to respond quickly and efficiently when disaster strikes. Here’s what parents should know about these important simulations and how they protect your children and loved ones.
What Are Emergency Preparedness Drills?
Emergency preparedness drills are realistic, carefully planned scenarios that simulate crises like mass casualty incidents, natural disasters, chemical spills, pandemics, or active shooter events. They involve doctors, nurses, emergency responders, hospital staff, and often even volunteers acting as “patients.”
During these drills, teams practice everything from triage and patient flow to communication with outside agencies like fire departments and public health officials. The goal is simple: ensure that everyone knows their role and can perform under pressure—when real lives are on the line.
Why Do Hospitals Need to Practice?
Think of these exercises as fire drills, on a much larger scale. Just like children practice evacuating their school, hospital staff need to rehearse how they would respond to an emergency that could involve dozens to hundreds of injured patients.
There are several reasons why these drills are essential:
Improved Response Time
Seconds matter in an emergency. Preparedness drills help staff find bottlenecks, delays, or miscommunications that could cost lives if not corrected.
Team Coordination
Emergency response involves multiple departments and agencies. In a disaster, not only does each doctor need to know what they’re treating, but all sorts of people and departments and agencies need a highly-coordinated joint response – everyone knows their part, and all the parts work together. A big exercise shows us how well everyone’s working together and lets us find if we have too many people handling one part of the response, and not enough dealing with other parts.
Systems Testing
These drills test equipment, communication systems, security protocols, backup power sources and even the disaster plan itself. The plans might be great, but will they work? Sometimes we can’t tell until we try them out, and it’s better to try them out in an exercise than in a real disaster!
Training for Rare Scenarios
Fortunately, large-scale disasters are rare—but that means most staff have little real-world experience managing them. Exercises also let us test our knowledge, and test things we may not know. A good exercise designer can throw in some injuries or illnesses most doctors never get to see, an exotic infection, or an unusual chemical used in a terrorist attack. This helps us learn about support resources we rarely need, like the CDC or a radiation expert.
Why Today?
In the old days, we had one or two team members who were extremely interested in disaster readiness, and we used them to help design our drills, and scheduled them to work the day (yes, it was always in the daytime) of the exercise. Of course, we always did well, but it wasn’t really a fair assessment if the staff responding to the drill knew what and when it was going to happen. These days we have more un-announced, and some off-hours exercises too, all to keep us ready.
When hospitals are well-prepared, they can save more lives.
We take part in exercises to develop our skills, to develop our confidence, and to find areas needing improvement. We do all of this, even on your family’s worst day when you’re here with a sick or injured child, so we can be ready for when it’s Ohio’s worst day.
Marcel J. Casavant, MD, treats poisoned children at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, and he’s a toxicologist at the Central Ohio Poison Center. He’s also an Emeritus Professor at The Ohio State University where he has taught Emergency Medicine and Medical Toxicology for more than thirty years.
Valley Anderson
Poison Control Center
Valley Anderson is a poison control specialist supervisor in the Poison Control Center at Nationwide Children's Hospital.
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