Hospitals are some of the busiest facilities out there – especially nowadays since they are dealing with a global pandemic. There is always some new trauma to deal with or surgery to perform, alongside the regular day-to-day management and care of patients.
Typically, hospital staff members have their own tried and true methods for ensuring that proper staffing levels are maintained for a facility in an effort to make sure that daily operations run smoothly. However, what happens when there is a sudden mass casualty event requiring the immediate assistance of additional personnel?
In the event of a sudden influx of patients due to a mass casualty, hospitals need to be able to send out an emergency recall to their off-duty or on-call staff, calling them into the facility to help deal with the situation. Requests for additional personnel need to be able to be sent out quickly and efficiently, and only to those who are required in order to prevent a situation of “too many cooks.” Hospital staff need a way to identify the personnel who have the requisite skill sets that can help patients most efficiently without having to manually sort through their contact lists.
Seems like this could be difficult to pull off, doesn’t it?
However, with the right medical resource management software, sending emergency recalls to staff can be made much simpler and more efficient, thanks to bulk sending, templated notifications, and automation capabilities.
Here’s how it can be done in five steps.
Step 1: Maintain accurate contact information
First, hospital staff will need to ensure all their staff members’ contact information is stored in an online contact management database. As well, these contact records need to be kept current and up to date with each employee’s current job title and qualifications. This will make it easier for staff to ensure they are calling the right people into work.
Up-to-date contact information can be collected through the use of forms sent out to your staff that they can fill out themselves and submit. Once these forms are submitted the information in the contact database will be updated automatically.
Step 2: Create an emergency recall dashboard template
The next step hospital staff need to complete is creating a template for the emergency recall that will send out the request for additional personnel once it gets launched. Hospital staff can create a custom event dashboard that will provide them with all the information they need to know about the recall at a glance, such as reporting information, status information, and any other information pertaining to the resource request. This dashboard will eliminate the need for emergency hospital staff to navigate between multiple interfaces to find out the information they need to know.
Step 3: Create the emergency recall notification content
While setting up the emergency recall dashboard template, hospital staff can also set up a templated recall notification that can be used and modified whenever it’s needed. By templating this notification, be sure to keep the content as generic as possible so it will apply to every emergency scenario. Whenever an instance of this notification is launched, emergency staff can add any additional information required that is specific to the ongoing emergency.
The notification content can be created for three separate communication channels: email, SMS, and voice. Again, creating and templating the emergency recall notification in advance will save hospital staff a lot of valuable time during an emergency while still ensuring staff will be able to receive the recall notification.
Step 4: Choose your required recall recipients
When mobilizing resources to deal with an emergency, it is important that the appropriate staff members are called in to duty. This means that they have the required skillsets and/or the appropriate job responsibilities to deal with the ongoing situation.
Hospital staff are also able to specify what kind of responders they are looking for to satisfy the emergency recall request, as well as how many people matching the specified criteria are required to report to duty.
For example, a resource request is sent out to a contact list containing nurses, doctors, and surgeons. Emergency staff can specify in the request that they need an additional 15 nurses, 10 doctors, and 7 surgeons, and once the recall recipients reply to the notification to indicate they can report to work, they will receive a confirmation message saying they are still required. Any additional resources who respond once the quota has been met will automatically receive a message saying that the request has been fulfilled and they do not need to respond.
Step 5: Launch the emergency recall
Once hospital staff saves their emergency recall dashboard as a template, it can now be launched the next time additional hospital resources are required to assist with an emergency. With only some minor customization to the recall notification and some adjustments to the recipient lists, the notification can be easily and efficiently tailored to any emergency situation and hospital staff can view all responses as they come in in real time.
After the emergency has been dealt with, the reports for the notification can be reviewed in order to determine who responded to the resource request, who didn’t, and any other information about the notification send. This report can help hospital staff optimize the template for future uses as well, either by tweaking the content or responder configurations.
Wondering what software can help manage emergency recalls?
SimplyCast provides a state-of-the-art, no-code medical resource management system that can be used to template and launch emergency staff recalls for hospitals. Using its emergency event templating tool in conjunction with its staff recall management functionality, hospitals can create as many emergency communication templates as needed to manage any number of various emergency scenarios.
If your hospital is looking for a tool to help manage your emergency recalls, check out what SimplyCast has to offer by clicking the button below to request a one-on-one demo of the product by our knowledgeable Sales Team!
