Hope for the Best, Prepare for the Worst
By Joshua Edson, Sr. Public Affairs Specialist
When disaster strikes, everything stops. Highways and businesses may close, and many people might have an enforced day off, but what happens when, no matter what the situation, a company or facility simply cannot shut its doors?
As a health care facility, Durham VA must do everything it can to keep its doors open and our facility fully staffed. That means that we must have contingencies for any type of emergency.
“We have an emergency operations plan that covers different disaster situations or incidents,” Paul Well, Durham VA Safety Chief and U.S. Navy Veteran, says. “This is our guiding principle when it comes to preparing and mitigating any emergency that comes up.”
This includes keeping stockpiles of supplies that can be prepared and deployed quickly in the event of an emergency. For example, when the recent winter storm hit the Durham area, staff from a variety of Durham VA services came together to ensure we had a sufficient supply of cots and blankets for staff who might be stuck at work and unable to return home when the roads became impassable.
“In safety and emergency management, the key phrase is often ‘it depends,” Wells says. “How we prepare and how we allocate our resources depends on the potential severity of the situation. This could be cots and blankets, to buses and mobile health clinics.”
These preparations paid off two years ago, when the Clayton-East Raleigh VA Clinic was flooded. Within a day, Durham VA’s central facility had a mobile clinic up and running, providing continuity of care for Veterans who rely on the clinic for their health care.
“The VA’s resources are unlimited in a disaster,” Wells says. “If we’d needed to transport patients to the Durham VA for their care, we could have done that as well.”
With disaster preparedness, it’s not a matter of if it’s going to happen; it’s a matter of when. With so many Veterans depending on the Durham VA for their care, we simply cannot afford to “skip a beat” when disaster strikes.
“We can’t predict the weather or any serious event,” Wells says. “But we still prepare for it because lives literally depend on us.”