Fire drill

I work in an academic medical center OR, and our annual fire and safety drill is a collaboration between the nurse educators/leaders and the safety department.

Nurse educator responsibilities:

• Determine the locations for each station
• Divide the staff into groups to rotate through each station
• Create the scenario for the evacuation station and assist in running the station

Safety department responsibilities:

• Create/maintain/update video education via the online learning management system when onboarding all new hires (how to use the evacuation devices, OR specific fire safety, etc)
• Provide equipment for each station for the drill
• Run the stations solo or with an OR expert 

The stations that we have:

• Evacuation device practice (safety runs this themselves and brings the devices) - the staff love dragging each other down the OR hallways ? and we fortunately have not had any injuries from overzealousness 
• Fire extinguisher, fire pull station, and medical gas shutoff valve training (safety runs this themselves and brings all of the equipment - a digital fire/extinguisher set up to practice using an extinguisher, demo med gas valves, demo pull station) - a real pull station will be used for the first group to qualify as the required drill for the month, after that it switches to the demo one they bring
• Evacuating an OR (this is the one the OR educators or leaders and safety run together, safety for their expertise in evacuation, the OR educators or leaders for their expertise in our little corner of the world). The educators create a scenario each year that would necessitate evacuating the OR - we try to switch it up every year.

This takes an insane amount of collaboration to get all of the right players in the right place; we start planning about 4 months in advance because our safety folks come in earlier than their normal hours to support us.

And we get it all done in the hour reserved for education for the month with about 18 minutes per station and a couple of minutes in between for staff to get to their next assigned station.

Rose, can you address" how.when to evacuate a postoperative patient"

NRSKarenRN said:

Rose, can you address" how.when to evacuate a postoperative patient"

The scenario we use has the fire in the same room as the patient and isn't easily extinguished. That's the only reason we would evacuate.