Members of Wayne Township Fire Rescue hosted a county-wide training at Fayette County Memorial Hospital Tuesday evening.
Members of Washington Fire and Concord-Greene Fire attended along with hospital staff.
If hazardous materials contaminate a patient, decontaminating that person(s) must occur before they enter the facility. Without doing that, other people and crucial equipment could be contaminated and be devastating to the operation of the emergency department.
Wayne Township members have been working with the hospital staff and improving the operation for any trained Hazardous Material Personnel to respond and assist with decontaminating a patient quickly.
Those in attendance were provided a scenario, and had to receive a patient role-playing and clean him for the hospital staff to accept for treatment.
There were several objectives for this event:
-First, to provide every fire department in Fayette County the opportunity to train together on an issue most likely to happen. Many households have a lot of common chemicals, and alone pose little risk. However, mixing those chemicals with another can potentially create a dangerous reaction.
-Second, was to emphasize the need for trained personnel assisting the hospital with decontamination patients. Fayette County Emergency Management Agency (EMA) had the chiefs recently assist with the updating of Annex O of the County Emergency Operations Plan. In the response procedures of this plan, providing decontamination support personnel to the hospital was added.
-Third, to run the operation as close to a real event as possible, such as a mock disaster. The best way to identify deficiencies and to focus on the area of improvement is to run the course as an emergency.
-Last is to have as many people with different points of views as possible to provide input on making the operation better. It isn’t easy to improve this operation from only a few aspects of perspective. Every level of trained personnel has value, and it is essential to include them in helping make anything better.
“We were able to identify things that would need to be addressed and plan on doing this again until we can assure the operation is ready to the best of our abilities,” explained Chris Wysong, chief of Wayne Township Fire Rescue.
