250172 Nursing Home Preparedness for an Ice Storm: A concerted mitigation effort

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Charles Stewart, MD, EMDM, MPH(student) , Department of Emergency Medicine, University of Oklahoma, Tulsa, OK
Lessons Learned from the 2007 Tulsa, Oklahoma Ice Storm In the last decade, increasing importance has been placed on building resiliency into critical healthcare systems. This has meant shifting the paradigm from focusing on response to one of preparedness. In 2007, a massive ice storm occurred in the South Central United States caused extensive power outages, in Tulsa, Oklahoma and the surrounding areas, for as long as 3 weeks before power was restored. Five of the six tertiary care hospitals in Tulsa suffered power outages, phone system failures or oxygen and/or suctioning system failures. Local water treatment plants were without power for 48 hours. During this time, multiple extended-care (nursing home) patients were discharged to homes or transferred to hospitals because the nursing homes were not prepared to cope with an extended power outage. This presentation is a retrospective analysis and discussion of lessons learned with respect to the vulnerability of these extended-care healthcare systems and the public health response during natural disasters that involve extended power-losses.

Learning Areas:
Administer health education strategies, interventions and programs
Administration, management, leadership
Public health administration or related administration
Systems thinking models (conceptual and theoretical models), applications related to public health

Learning Objectives:
Evaluate long term care facility preparedness for power loss and other consequences of an ice storm Design a strategy to mitigate future failure Identify components needed to enhance preparedness including which agencies, what messages, and where delivered. Evaluate the effects of the multimedia, multidimensional strategy

Keywords: Problem Based Learning, Local Public Health Agencies

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I conducted much of the training, I was the director of the Oklahoma Disaster Institute
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.

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