Surgical Fire Question

Hi, Me again!

After doing a well received fire inservice, fire drill/OR evacuation presentation,

I've become the fire guy in our hospital.

I'm in the process of re-doing our OR policy on evacuations.

My question to "All Nurses.com land" is, when a room is evacuated and clear, how do you mark it???

Our general hospital policy says to put a pillow in front of the door. Something that I just don't think would work for us.

In the world of disaster preparedness (I teach CERT training) we mark a slash on the door when we are in there searching, another slash, making it an "X" on the door when the room is clear of victims and search personnel.

Since we would be dealing with the fire service, this makes sense.

I've thought of tape, sharpie markers, or china markers, but am afraid that they would "walk off" and not be there when needed.

Any suggestions, what do you all have in place???

Thanks in advance.

Mike

Tape seems to be pretty readily available in the OR. I can't see not being able to get hold of a couple of rolls somewhere.

There was a nice thread on this at SDN:

http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showthread.php?t=451185

The best post was this:

"I'm sure your hospital has an extremely detailed emergency plan that deals with fires anywhere in the hospital, including the OR's. You should look at it. Every single person in our hospital from CEO to Chief of Staff to volunteer and everyone in between is required to take the hospital's "life safety" test every two years (maybe a JCAHO requirement?)

An airway fire is often self limiting - removing the fuel (tube) and oxygen source and the fire goes out. I agree, I'd probably remove the drapes as well.

For any other fire in the OR, use the fire emergency plan your hospital has in place. Usually it's something like

R escue

A larm

C onfine

E xtinguish

Someone in the OR should be calling the HOSPITAL emergency number, usually the same one used for cardiac arrest. Calling 911 from the OR is not a great idea - takes too long and they really have no idea where OR 17 is located. Call your hospital emergency number - tell them you have a fire in the OR - they'll do the rest. They call the hospital-wide Code Red (or whatever your hospital calls it) and then 911. Each hospital is required to have staff members available to respond to fires, and each has certain responsibilities, just like in Code Blue.

One interesting tidbit - you know those medical gas shutoff valves you see out in the halls in the OR? What do YOU do with those in case of a fire? NOTHING! You have no idea how many other rooms or areas may be affected by closing those valves. Sure, you may have a fire in your room, but the next five rooms down the hall all have patients on O2, and you just shut off the supply to all those other patients. Your hospital likely has a very specific policy addressing this as well, and it will specify exactly who can make the decision to shut off those valves - you're not on that list.

Finally - have you ever had a real fire drill in the OR? If not, you should. We do it at least once a year, fairly unannounced. We'll take an unused OR, put a mannequin under the drapes, then call an OR team to set up a case. When they walk in the room, we give them a scenario, and tell them to do exactly what they would do in a real fire, and then shut up and watch the response. If you haven't been educated for this, it's both comical and scary as hell."

David Carpenter, PA-C