Chapter 5 (continued)
The Spectrum of Adaptation: From Administrative to Clinical Change
In the case of a longer-term resource
shortage, strategies for meeting the event-generated demands of an mass casualty event (MCE) can
be classified along a spectrum that includes two categories of changes: administrative
adaptations and clinical adaptations, as shown in Figure
5.3.
Administrative adaptations are designed to increase provider
availability for patient care. Though their effect on clinical care should
be minimal, it must be recognized that changes in shift length or staffing
patterns will increase the risk for complications such as infections.
Administrative changes generally can be implemented with minimal discussion
by hospital administration or nursing personnel, but such changes require
preplanning. Examples of administrative changes may include the following:
- Changes to reduce provider documentation, billing and coding, registration,
and other administrative policy burdens. These should be discussed in advance
with the State and Federal agencies that oversee public health insurance
programs and with private payers.
- Cancellation of elective procedures. The definition of "elective" may
vary with the severity and duration of the situation and requires daily
review; a surgery to remove a neoplasm, for example, may be elective for
24 hours but not for weeks.
- Reassignment of qualified administrative nursing staff
members to clinical roles or use of nonhospital staff members, potentially
including family members, to provide basic patient care.
- Adoption of Continuity of Operations (COOP) strategies
within each department as needed to cope with the impact of the event. A
good COOP plan details the critical functions and staffing within each department
and lists ways for these functions to be carried out when the staff or infrastructure
is inadequate to carry on daily operations.
Surge Capacity Resources The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Facilities Report Surge
Hospitals: Providing Safe Care in Emergencies is available online
at: http://www.jointcommission.org/PublicPolicy/surge_hospitals.htm.
Seamless Emergency Medical Logistics Expansion System (SEMLES) promotes
the development of collaborative relationships between public and private
entities and between local and regional partners to expand surge capacity.
Information on SEMLES is available at: http://www.disasterhelp.net/resources.
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One important staffing issue to consider in the context of MCE planning is
the concern that a significant proportion of health care providers will fail
to report to work if they perceive a threat to themselves or their family
members from contamination by biological or radiological agents. Certain States
have provisions to de-license or otherwise sanction (or even arrest, in the
State of Maryland) providers who do not report for duty during a declared
disaster. It is important, to remember, however, that although health care
providers have a duty to act and may have been supported in their training
by Federal dollars, there are real concerns about the "duty to family"
and issues of child care, among others, which may not be solved easily.
Careful determination of priority groups and essential personnel as well
as facilitation of child care, providing adequate PPE, providing housing apart
from family for workers who request it, and other "carrots" need to accompany the
regulatory "sticks" designed to ensure that health care workers are
able to work (and work safely) during a disaster.
Clinical adaptations represent the allocation of scarce resources or services
based on the ethical principles outlined in Chapter
2.
Examples of clinical adaptations include the following:
- Triage of patients to home care, acute care sites, or other offsite locals
who would otherwise be treated as inpatients.
- Assignment of limited resources (e.g., ventilators, radiographs, laboratory
testing) to those most expected to benefit.
- Provision of specialty care (e.g., burn or intensive care) by nonspecialty
trained staff members (ideally with supervision by appropriately trained
staff members).
Implementing Clinical Changes to Respond to an MCEExamples of Possible Response Processes
- The incident commander recognizes the need for systematic clinical
changes.
- The planning chief gathers any guidelines, information, and resources.
- A clinical care committee (predetermined members and designees for
toxic, infectious, and trauma situations) is convened. Members may
include a hospital administrator, a hospital attorney, nursing supervisor,
a respiratory care supervisor, a hospital ethicist, a community representative,
and representatives from clinical departments.
- The clinical care committee reviews existing strategies/protocols
and determines:
- Methods to meet patient care needs, location of care,
assignment of resources.
- Additional changes in staff responsibilities
to redistribute specialized staff and incorporate other health
care providers, lay providers, or family members.
- A mechanism to reassess local/regional hospital efforts and
needs and recommend changes on a regular basis.
- Information is disseminated to inpatient services, outpatient services,
the regional hospital coordination point, and State and local health
departments.
- Security and behavioral health response plans are implemented.
- Triage plan is implemented to determine ED/outpatient screening
of patients, patient discharge, removal from therapy, and bed assignments.
- Just-in-time training or education is implemented for health care
workers, patients, and family members.
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The hospital should be able to follow State guidance regarding clinical triage
decisions. If no guidance exists, it will be incumbent on the hospital to
have a plan or strategy for bringing together the appropriate personnel who
can make the best decisions possible and reevaluate the situation during each
planning cycle (e.g., each shift a day). When there is little advance evidence
to guide allocation decisions (for example, not knowing how different age
groups with pandemic influenza respond to mechanical ventilation), good clinical
judgment by experienced clinicians will be the final common denominator to
justify resource allocation decisions. The decisionmaking process, based on
ethical judgments that include maximizing good consequences across the many
while meeting at least minimal duties and obligations to all, should be shared
openly with staff members, patients, and the public and should be as consistent
as possible across facilities.
The goal is to adjust clinical care to a level appropriate to the resources
available and to do so in as smooth, transparent, consistent, and incremental
a fashion as possible. There are no clear "trigger" or "trip"
points to indicate when the shift from reactive, mostly administrative changes to
proactive, clinical changes must occur. Communities and regions should coordinate
as much as possible. Situational awareness by the Incident Commander and Planning
Section Chief can help anticipate or recognize resource bottlenecks that may
require intervention.
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Allocating Scarce Resources
Patient Assessment
The American Medical Association (AMA) has identified five important criteria
to consider when the allocation of scarce resources is required: likelihood
of benefit, change in quality of life, duration of benefit, urgency of need,
and amount of resources required. According to the AMA guidance, all five
of these criteria must be considered. If there is no differentiation in the
criteria between patients, then resources should be allocated on a "first
come, first served" basis.
At a minimum, patient assessment should include the following factors:
- The patient's need for the resource.
- Potential to return to
the baseline state.
- Overall acute resource needs of the patient.
- Age and functional assessment (e.g., Quality Adjusted Life Years or
other tools when significant functional differences are present between
patients).
- Underlying health and prognosis related to an underlying disease(s).
- Event-specific or injury-specific prognostic factors.
Patient Triage
There are three basic types of triage. Primary triage is the first triage
of patients into the medical system (it may occur prehospital), at which point
patients are assigned an acuity level based on the severity of their illness/disease.
Secondary triage is the reevaluation of the patient's condition after
initial medical care (go to Box).69 This
may occur at the hospital following EMS interventions or after initial interventions
in the ED. Tertiary triage is the reevaluation of the patients' response
to treatment after further interventions and is ongoing during their hospital stay.
This is the least practiced and least well-defined type of triage.
Historically, triage has involved four levels of priority for traumatic injuries:
- Green—delayed treatment—has minor injuries or illness
and should not pose a threat to life or limb.
- Yellow—intermediate—has injuries or illness that may result
in death or disability but pose no immediate threat to life or limb.
- Red—critical—has injuries or illness that will result
in death within the hour unless interventions occur.
- Black—expectant or deceased—is expected to die because
of severity of illness or injuries or has died.
It is important to note that criteria such as gender,
race, ability to pay, social worth, perceived obstacles to treatment,
patient contribution to illness, or past use of resources are not appropriate
criteria for determining the allocation of scarce resources. Age may
be considered only as it relates to underlying organ function and prognosis.
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An experienced health care provider should be involved in any decision to
classify a patient as "black" during a disaster. As described
in Chapter 7, all such patients should have access to palliative care (analgesia,
sedation, physical and behavioral cares) to the extent possible under the
circumstances. Expectant patients should be reassessed regularly for comfort,
for improvements in their situation, or in case resources become available
unexpectedly.
Studies have shown that experienced health care providers are generally
very accurate at assigning triage levels in the ED on a daily basis,70 though
there are no studies to determine to what degree this is true in disasters.
An example of an existing triage tool is the Emergency Severity Index (ESI),
perhaps the best-studied hospital ED approach to triage. While highly predictive
of resource use within the ED, the ESI was not designed, however, for disaster
situations per se. Simple Triage and Rapid Treatment triage may be used for
traumatic injuries, but it is perhaps too simplistic for application in the
ED setting and has not been validated.
The Emergency Severity Index (ESI)The ESI is a five-level ED triage algorithm that provides clinically
relevant stratification of patients into five groups, from 1 (most urgent)
to 5 (least urgent), on the basis of acuity and resource needs. The
ESI Implementation Handbook is available at: http://www.ahrq.gov/research/esi/esi1.htm.
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Overall illness severity and mortality prediction scores (Mortality Probability
Model II, Sequential Organ Failure Assessment) and organ system-specific mortality
predictors (oxygenation index—FiO2 x mean airway pressure / pO2 has
predictive value in pediatric patients, for example) may be used to provide
quantitative estimates of survival or severity. These prediction scores present
limitations, however, in that they are validated on cohorts, not individuals,
and generally require data obtained from laboratory or other invasive measures.71,72
An example of a secondary triage decision tool is the American Burn
Association table of mortality graphed against age and percent body surface
area burns, which allows a burn surgeon to make immediate rough determinations
of the resource needs and projected mortality of a given patent and allocate,
when needed, limited resources available.
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Select Operational Considerations
In addition to allocating scarce resources, an MCE will require that hospitals
also address many operational considerations, including security and mass mortuary.
Security
Disasters that require systematic changes in the provision of health
care are likely to have had similar pronounced effects on the community at
large. Civil unrest due to supply line disruptions, infrastructure damage,
and resource scarcity are not uncommon in such situations. Resources in short
supply may be subject to hoarding or internal pilfering (e.g., of vaccine,
of antibiotics). Any changes in usual clinical care that result in resources
not being available to all patients who may need them may increase the potential
for violence against health care facilities and providers.
Hospitals should work with their community law enforcement agencies and
security staff members to develop a security assessment and vulnerability
analysis and a plan for augmenting hospital security during a widespread disaster,
when demands on law enforcement may be extreme. This plan should prioritize
hospital assets for protection and rely, when possible, on physical and technological,
rather than human solutions. Proactive communication with the public can reduce
the potential for civil unrest and should be part of community and institutional
strategies.
Security measures that hospitals may wish to consider in an MCE include:
- Increased security personnel.
- Increased monitoring of hospital premises and surroundings.
- A lockdown plan that can be rapidly implemented (including campus buildings
that may be used in nontraditional capacities as part of the facility response
plan).
- Single or few designated entrances.
- The limit of a single visitor (or no visitors) per patient.
- Metal detectors and security screening at entry points.
- Augmented law enforcement presence (must have mutual aid agreements in
place ahead of an event; consider uniformed peace officers or National Guard
personnel).
- Equipping and training hospital security personnel with less-than-lethal
methods of behavioral control (if not already so equipped) with appropriate
policies and oversight (e.g., batons, pepper spray, TASER electroshock guns
or similar electric-current immobilizer devices).
- Other deterrents at entrances (presence of canine officers, increased
uniformed security presence).
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Mass Mortuary
Hospitals should understand clearly the community plan for management of
excess casualties. In some cases, hospital responsibilities for record keeping
and reporting will change in a disaster. Temporary facility morgue locations
may be required, and regional processing sites may be needed. The role of
the medical examiner's office versus that of public health should be
clearly defined. This should include situations such as pandemic influenza,
which normally would not involve the medical examiner's office.
Provisions
should be made for appropriate solutions to barriers presented by culturally
based funeral and burial practices. Every effort should be made to preplan
for adjusting standards of care as appropriate to the situation, to advise
and involve the public and faith-based communities in these decisions, and
to ensure that the minimum level of disruption to usual cultural practices
and the maximum level of dignity are afforded the deceased and their families.
Conducting Patient Triage
New Orleans International Airport—Hurricane Katrina Three Disaster Medical Assistance Teams (DMATs) were faced with the
task of providing medical care to tens of thousands of patients at New
Orleans International Airport who had been evacuated or rescued from
their homes, nursing homes, and hospitals. Approximately 300 of these
patients were stretcher bound. Few had acute injuries, but many had
complex medical problems exacerbated by dehydration, infections, and
lack of medications.
There was essentially no ability to communicate externally, nor was
there an identified command element to request additional resources
and evacuation assistance in the first 24 hours of the operation. Standard
triage tags were used for nonambulatory patients, and they were prioritized
for care and evacuation. Approximately 50 extremely sick patients were
tagged as "expectant" due to the lack of clinical
resources and transferred to a separate area of the airport.
Many of these were elderly with complex underlying health problems and
unstable vital signs, coma, or other poor prognostic signs—and
were expected by the clinician to die within the next 24 hours. As staff
members and resources became available, some of these individuals were
reclassified as "red" and provided care. Ultimately,
only 26 of these patients died, thanks to the efforts of the DMATs, who
also treated hundreds of other critical and serious patients. A Herculean
evacuation effort over the subsequent several days and the arrival of
additional staff members and resources prevented further deaths. |
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