Emergency Preparedness

Stephanie Trowbridge
Manager Emergency Preparedness│Corporate Policy Lead
Interim Senior Manager Office of the President

Session details to be announced.

Code White refers to an emergency response to a situation in which an individual within hospital boundaries is behaving in a potentially dangerous manner towards themselves or others and indicates a potential for escalating or is escalating beyond the abilities of the present staff to manage the situation.

Session Objectives:
• How the facility implemented code white, the roles, and responsibilities of all staff involved and all lessons learned from the post-event debriefing

Code Grey is a planned response to infrastructure loss or failure in a hospital.

In the early hours of September 25, 2019, a virus was discovered on one of the IT systems at Michael Garron Hospital, later identified as Ryuk. The virus affected the functionality of many major computer systems, including both clinical and administrative applications. For the first time in many years, clinical teams were forced to revert back to predominantly paper processes and using the telephone to call codes, access porters, check dietary orders and perform the regular operations of the hospital.

Session Objectives:
• Provide a brief description of the incident
• Highlight how the hospital implemented code gray
• Share lessons learned and updates to emergency preparedness policies

Jennifer Sampson
Emergency Medicine
Michael Garron Hospital

Session Objectives:

Dr. Sean Moore
Emergency Physician from Kenora Ontario
Medical Director of Education, Ornge Transport
Chief of Emergency Services, Lake of the Woods District Hospital

In the light of rising mass casualty events, health care organizations are revisiting their Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA) policies and procedures to determine exactly what information they are allowed to share and to whom they may share information: family and friends of the patient, media outlets, law enforcement, and health care partner organizations.

Session Objectives:
• Provide an overview of PHIPA legislation: origins and how it works
• Highlight what changes and how organizations stay compliant with PHIPA legislation during mass casualty events
• Provide a few case studies to highlight the importance of sharing information in a timely manner while staying compliant with PHIPA

Mary Gavel
Privacy Lead
CritiCall Ontario
Hamilton Health Sciences

Towns and cities with universities across the country are seeing more and more “Fake Homecoming” parties (Foco). Some statistics from the 2018 Foco in London: 20,000 people, 134 charges, 57 hospitalized. In 2019 key emergency management stakeholders, including London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC), came together six months prior to the anticipated date of the event, to proactively prepare.

While unified command within the Incident Management System (IMS) is not new, creating and working in multidisciplinary response teams on street level is still considered relatively unique. In this session, the speaker will share the knowledge they have acquired through their experience in preparing for 2019 FoCo.

Session Objectives:
• Demonstrate the importance of identifying and working with stakeholders from the initial planning stages when preparing for mass gathering events
• Highlight secondary risks that can negatively impact potential trauma patient care in a hospital’s response to a mass gathering event

Rosemary Thuss
Manager, Emergency Management
London Health Sciences Centre

In this session, the speaker shares his lived experience of a mental health journey with acute stress disorder that began with responding to and helping disaster survivors recover from, three of Canada’s largest and costliest disasters. The presentation also outlines support strategies for first responders and other disaster and emergency management professionals, including the latest research from the Centre for Studies on Human Stress.

Session Objectives:
• Improve the attendees’ ability to identify elements that make work or life events stressful
• Show how support fits into busy schedules and discuss ways attendees can ‘pre-set’ their support for future events

Brad Ison
Director of Training, Accreditation, and Standards, Alberta Emergency Management Agency
Owner, All Hazards Coaching,

GTA Unified took place on November 28, 2019: A functional, multi-agency, cross-jurisdictional, health-sector focused mass casualty emergency preparedness exercise designed to evaluate a health-system response to a complex mass casualty event within the Greater Toronto Area: 34 participating organizations, including 22 hospital sites.

In the first part of this session, the speakers will share their experience in designing, preparing and implementing the exercise.

Session Objectives:
• Share the experience of designing an exercise of this size
• Highlight the preparations leading up to the exercise
• The exercise organizer’s lessons learned and updates to their own emergency preparedness policies

In the second part of the session, volunteer delegates will highlight their own experiences in participating in the exercise.

Session Objectives:
• What other organizations have learned through participating in this exercise and what others would like to see in future multi-agency exercises

Claudia Cocco
Emergency Preparedness Coordinator
Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre
Emergency Preparedness Hospital Lead
Toronto Central LHIN

Moira Hennebury
Emergency Preparedness Specialist
Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and Toronto Central LHIN