Is your disaster plan pediatric ready?
- Published May 31, 2022
While there are many unknowns in life, one thing that is certain is that there will always be the next natural disaster, pandemic, or other public health emergency coming to challenge health care systems.
The Emergency Medical Services for Children Innovation and Improvement Center (EIIC) is excited to share the recently updated Checklist of Essential Pediatric Domains and Considerations for Every Hospital’s Disaster Preparedness Policies. This is an update to the original 2014 checklist and seeks to expand its utility. The checklist is intended to be used as a tool to help hospital administrators and leadership incorporate essential pediatric considerations into existing hospital disaster policies.
In addition to evaluating and updating the ten domains of the original version of the checklist, the evacuation domain was introduced in this update. Another key modification to the revised checklist was the addition of progressive categories for recommendations (foundation, intermediate, and advanced) which enable disaster planners to tailor considerations based on approximate hospital pediatric volume and inpatient pediatric capabilities and capacity.
What it is designed to do: This tool was designed to complement and augment existing disaster resources, both pediatric-specific and general, rather than to serve solely as a stand-alone document. The relative importance assigned to any given consideration is unique to each facility based on their specific risk assessments.
What it is not designed to do: This is not a step-by-step guide to implementing policies. Instead, resources are provided for each domain to provide more details and help implement the considerations.
The last two years have been extremely challenging. Now is the time to learn from those experiences and improve the way that infants, children, and adolescents receive care in the next disaster. The EIIC Pediatric Disaster Preparedness Toolkit can help.
Find additional information on disaster preparedness, visiting EIIC's Disaster Preparedness webpage.