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IHA’s annual Emergency Preparedness Exercise—open to all IHA members—will address a scenario that has taken on increasing urgency in healthcare: how to respond to an active threat inside a hospital. Such incidents require hospital employees to make life-and-death decisions in a matter of seconds. That’s why training is essential for frontline staff, who are most vulnerable to workplace violence, and hospital leadership.
Active threat events end in less than eight minutes, but their effects can last a lifetime. Beyond the worst-case outcomes of death and physical injury, survivors can experience psychological trauma such as PTSD, leaving hospitals with potentially substantial staff turnover as workers leave their jobs or healthcare altogether.
Nearly 75 percent of perpetrators in hospital threats target a specific individual. About one-fifth of victims are hospital employees, including physicians and nurses. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University, who examined hospital shootings, noted that establishing “impenetrable hospital security in an open society represents a particular challenge, and zero risk is not achievable.”
Since no hospital or health system is immune to these types of events, IHA encourages all members to participate in our full-scale, statewide simulation on Nov. 8. Frontline staff and leaders will benefit from the opportunity to activate their response plans and enhance those plans based on the experience of the simulation. In addition, participating helps fulfill a requirement of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services that mandates hospitals to demonstrate a completion of two exercises per year.
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Continuing Education Credit
The Illinois Health and Hospital Association (IHA) is authorized by the State of Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation (license number 236.000109) to award up to 3.5 hours of nurse continuing education credit for this program.
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