Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre (RVH) enacted its annual emergency preparedness exercise – a CODE GREEN, in collaboration with community partners – on Sept. 29.
The training exercise, which was six months in the planning, involved the full evacuation of 24 mock patients, many of which were portrayed by Georgian College students, from a staged Specialized Seniors’ Care unit on the health centre’s third-floor shelled space. The “patients” were safely transported to the Georgian College Barrie Campus Athletics Centre, along with all necessary staffing and equipment to safely care for this patient population for up to 72 hours.
RVH enacted a full Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) and deployed members of TEAM RVH, who volunteered to participate, to various roles according to the Code Green protocol. It is important to note that there was no interruption to patient care or services during this training exercise.
“At RVH safety is our promise and yesterday we put that promise to the test with a Code Green mock evacuation. Every year we enact an emergency training exercise to ensure we are well-prepared in the event we face a real disaster,” says Gail Hunt, RVH president and CEO. “This exercise is an opportunity to test and validate our new Emergency Response Plan with community partners.”
From EOC to the physical evacuation process, the exercise was a huge success and provided a great learning environment for all participants – Georgian College, City of Barrie, Barrie Police Service, County of Simcoe, County of Simcoe Paramedics, Canadian Red Cross, Georgian Bay Search and Rescue, Canadian Red Cross, St. John Ambulance, Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit.
“We’re always happy to partner with our neighbour RVH on these kind of training exercises,” said Chris Varney, manager of Safety and Emergency Planning at Georgian College. “While we hope there will never be a need to execute them, it’s extremely beneficial to go through these drills so we’re all well prepared in the event of any real threat or emergency in our community.”
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