This exercise was truly one in a thousand. A large-scale exercise taking place in and around an actual operating room, complete with all the equipment, monitors, a surgeon, anesthesiologist, an advanced simulation dummy as a patient, and surgical assistants. Not only was it a unique experience for the Safety and Health Region Gelderland-Midden, but also for FireWare.
In collaboration with the fire department, police, and ambulance services of the Safety and Health Region Gelderland-Midden, FireWare designed this exercise. Four consecutive evenings there were four different groups heading to the operating room at Rijnstate hospital in Velp for an incident. For many participants, it was their first time experiencing such a realistic simulation.
HEPA Filters
You don’t do an OR exercise every day, so a lot was done. The operating theater of the Rijnstate hospital has recently moved and could therefore be used for the exercise. This makes it extremely suitable. How often can you really practice in an OR four evenings in a row? And in this case we were able to run this exercise with our standard equipment and many amounts of practice smoke, because we did not have to take into account the very advanced and expensive HEPA filters in an OR.
The Scenario
A fire breaks out in the ventilation in the basement. The flames spread to the technical room of the operating room on the ground floor, which is adjacent to the operating room. The fire spreads quickly and reaches the operating room, where an operation is currently underway. The surgeon on site was played by someone from the fire brigade. He turned out to be a very good actor, who did not always make it easy for the troops or a challenge.
Communication
The biggest challenge for first responders in situations like this is communicating with hospital staff. Emergency workers cannot simply rush in. This must be done in close consultation with the anesthetist. Communication in a large hospital is also difficult. The same actually applies to the FireWare team on site. But our staging team is well attuned to this.
How did FireWare do it?
Ahead of time, the FireWare staging team collaborated with all parties involved to fully map out the scenario. Since FireWare was involved from the beginning, we could collectively design the exercise as realistically as possible. For staging, we used the Fire Simulation Kit V4, Soundbox V3, Phoenix Silkflames, and Stratus and Cumulus smoke generators.
All participants learned a lot from this experience. The same goes for the FireWare team, who found designing and running an exercise like this for an operating room truly fantastic!
