Sharing our Crisis Recovery Experiences
On the morning of January 8th 2014, a pipe burst in the second floor of our Juravinski Tower. This caused significant flooding, leading to cancelled surgeries and the temporary closure of our emergency department. While the flood affected our ability to deliver care to our patients, the urgent response from our staff, physicians and management allowed us to respond to the situation quickly and recover successfully.
Learning from our experiences in recovering from the flood has helped our organization to become more resilient to crises in the future. Conducting a formal review has also allowed us to share our findings with other organizations. Led by our staff and senior leadership team, a journal article summarizing our learning experiences has been published in the latest issue of Healthcare Quarterly.
“Collaboration between our staff and leadership was key in our efficient response and recovery of the incident,” states Stephanie Trowbridge, Manager of Emergency Preparedness. “Our leadership created an environment that individuals felt safe to share their innovative ideas to support the ongoing response and recovery efforts. It truly was amazing to see individuals from all areas across the organization working together to ensure the safety of our patients and the safety of each other.”
A key learning of the study was the ability to look at both an organization’s capacity to prepare for an incident, as well as their capability to respond to it.
“You can have all the emergency response plans in the world, but they are no good if they cannot be executed,” explains Stephanie. “Staff have said to me in the past that the monthly fire drills are a good foundation for testing our ability to respond to critical events, and much of the fundamentals of fire safety are transferable to other events. This was clearly exemplified in our organization’s response to the flood.”
Learning from our experiences in recovering from the flood allows us to better managing incidents and crises in the future. By sharing these experiences, we help others improve their own practices by studying ours.