Fire drill

[greener22, BSN, MSN, RN]

I am the professional nurse development specialist at a small community hospital. I am responsible for preop and PACU education for all staff. what I'm curious about is why I'm expected to conduct live fire drills. engineering handles the pulling of the alarm but I'm expected to set it all up and come up with fake fire and take attendance and do the teaching evacuation plans. I've asked the chief engineer why is this my responsibility and he replies that he doesn't know anything about how to appropriately evacuate a postoperative patient. it's not policy anywhere I don't feel that I'm qualified to direct people on when to evacuate. Do you have to do this at any of your facilities?

[FolksBtrippin, BSN, RN]

I was taught to close the fire doors and wait for rescue in a fire, not to evacuate my patients. Not sure if that helps you!

[chare]

@Nurse Beth previously discussed this and provided excellent advice here.

[Rose_Queen, BSN, MSN, RN]

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.

[NRSKarenRN, BSN, RN]

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

[Rose_Queen, BSN, MSN, RN]

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.

[greener22, BSN, MSN, RN]

Rose queen-I does sound like an incredible amount of work to go through but it pays off in the long run. I don't have the luxury of having everybody together for one hour. As we are a hospital we always have patients. I am not involved with the OR only the preop and two PACU areas. So I have to have one small drill at 5:30 in the morning for preop before their patients arrive. And then another one with inpatient PACU if and when they don't have patients and then another with outpatient PACU because they all evacuate differently. And I only get 20 to 30 minutes for each  drill.