Promoting regional disaster preparedness among rural hospitals

Context and Purpose: Rural communities face substantial risks of natural disasters but rural hospitals face multiple obstacles to preparedness. The objective was to create and implement a simple and effective training and planning exercise to assist individual rural hospitals to improve disaster preparedness, as well as to enhance regional collaboration among these hospitals. Methods: The exercise was offered to rural hospitals enrolled with the Rural and Community Health Institute of the Texas A&M University System Health Science Center, and 17 participated. A 3-hour tabletop exercise emphasizing regional issues in a pandemic avian influenza scenario followed by a 1-hour debriefing was implemented in 3 geographic clusters of hospitals. Trained emergency preparedness evaluators documented observations of the exercise on a standard form. Participants were debriefed after the exercise and provided written feedback. Results: Observations included having insufficient staff for incident command, facility constraints, the need to further develop regional cooperation, and operational and ethical challenges in a pandemic. Conclusions: The tabletop exercise gave evidence of being a simple and acceptable tool for rural medical planners. It lends itself well to improving medical preparedness, analysis of weak spots, development of regional teamwork, and rapid response.