Mary Madison, RN, RAC-CT, CDP
Clinical Consultant – Briggs Healthcare
During a pandemic or other emergency, health care facilities face significant challenges to quickly onboard additional health care providers when hospital admissions and intensive care units’ occupancy rapidly increase. The recently updated Health Care Facility Onboarding Checklist (1 page) can help facilities ensure new employees are compliant with administrative requirements, familiar with the mission and culture of the hospital, and understand expectations.
Hospitals and other health care facilities face significant challenges to quickly onboard additional health care providers when admissions and Intensive Care Unit (ICU) occupancy increase rapidly. Surge staffing may be needed to support natural disaster response, public health emergencies (including infectious disease outbreaks or pandemics), and acute staffing shortages. This Onboarding Checklist is a tool that can help hospitals and other facilities streamline staff acquisition and the onboarding process in times of need.
A checklist may help frame and expedite the onboarding process and can ensure new employees complete administrative requirements; become familiar with the mission, overall goals, and organizational culture of the facility; and are oriented to expectations for the department or unit assignment. This checklist uses a three-phase approach and includes links to helpful related online resources. It can be used as a resource for entities to develop more detailed facility- and health care system-specific processes. Note: While outside the scope of this checklist, health care facilities should also have a rapid offboarding process in place to protect patient safety and systems and facility security.
ASPR’s Office of Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) offers a variety of newsletters to keep stakeholders informed during emergency response and steady state. The newsletters inform stakeholders of the most significant issues facing the health care and public health sector including cybersecurity, health care supply chains, and more. If you are interested in receiving CIP newsletters, visit the CIP newsletter subscription webpage.
A concise, scalable surge response template can be a helpful quick reference to the hospital personnel tasked with expanding care capacity in the first hours of an incident and can minimize ad hoc and potentially conflicting decisions about prioritization of space and strategies. In the Mass Casualty Hospital Capacity Expansion Toolkit Demonstration, Dr. John Hick describes the toolkit and the process of completing each template. Check out the rest of the Health Care System Preparedness Considerations recordings for more lessons learned to bolster patient care and provider and system resilience.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecasters recently increased the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season prediction to “above normal;” please access our Hurricane Resources Page for related resources. Our Natural Disasters Topic Collection features fire/wildfire-specific sections on lessons learned and plans, tools, and templates that can help our audiences prepare and respond to similar situations. As always, we encourage you to reach out to ASPR TRACIE if you need technical assistance.
Impacts of Planned and Unplanned Power Disruptions on California’s Public Health and Medical Systems summarizes key takeaways which, in addition to understanding power supply regulations in specific jurisdictions, can help health care emergency planners prepare facilities, staff, and patients for public safety power shutoffs and outages in general. Information was pulled from the speaker series recording, where six panelists from various public health departments and health care systems in California share their recent experiences.
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