By Nick Buglione
Over three days starting Monday, May 12, instructors specializing in hazardous-materials training were called in to prep some 70 doctors, nurses, security staff and engineers on the ins and outs of treating casualties in a terrorist attack.
"What I try to do is give them a foundation of how they're going to handle a mass-casualty incident requiring decontamination, and I leave them with a lot of ideas so they can then go off and build on that," said Michael Justin, an instructor from the North Shore-LIJ Regional Healthcare Emergency Management Training Center, which has been working with a number of New York-area hospitals.
Victims of a chemical, biological or nuclear attack could likely introduce the hazardous substances on their bodies and clothes into the hospital, posing a serious threat to the staff and patients already inside. This makes decontamination outside the emergency room an essential first step before treatment -- which is what the NUMC staff practiced.
"The bottom line is, we don't want the health-care providers to become victims themselves," said Lee Shanley, NUMC's director of public safety. "They need to be able to treat the patients."
On each of the three days, more than 20 staff members, primarily from the emergency department, donned chemical suits and got acquainted with the new decontamination tent and trailer NUMC recently purchased -- part of the roughly $3 million to $4 million the hospital has spent on emergency preparedness and increased safety measures in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
"It's an investment we hope that will prove to be a waste of money," said Richard Turan, NUMC's president and CEO. "I think that everybody understands that the world we live in today means that we need to be prepared for any event. We have invested a lot of money, a lot of time and a lot of effort in being prepared."
During the sessions, half the staff, baking inside impermeable chemical suits, practiced guiding frantic, disoriented and incapacitated patients, played by the other workers, into the decontamination facilities outside the emergency room.
Each drill lasted about 20 minutes before the hospital workers stopped and switched roles. Even in the spring weather, temperatures inside the suits soared quickly. "It was exhausting and very hot," said Adam Olsen, a physician assistant in NUMC's emergency department, with sweat rolling down his brow. "You just have an incredibly new appreciation of what the individuals who are trained in this go through."
The exercises also proved somewhat surreal for Olsen and his fellow hospital staff, who probably never imagined as they began their careers that they'd be preparing for what once seemed to be an implausible scenario.
"It's actually a wake-up call to realize that something like this is reality and that something like this could actually happen," Olsen said, "where we would have to get into one of these suits and go through this scenario."
Though NUMC has held smaller drills geared toward emergency preparedness, this was the first large-scale one. "It's our intent to train not only the entire emergency department staff," said Michael Mostow, dean of academic affairs at the hospital. "Our goal in having them come in is not only to train a [large number] of people, but to train the trainers to so we could do this ourselves after that."
The hospital coordinated a similar evacuation and decontamination exercise with nearby East Meadow High School, the East Meadow Fire Department, the Nassau County Police Department and other emergency agencies on Tuesday, May 20, after press time.
