Drills / Exercises

A comprehensive, systematic exercise program enhances a hospital's readiness posture and moves the organization toward a more resilient stance. Exercises require careful planning and clearly identified goals and objectives in order to effectively evaluate and improve organizational capabilities and performance.

DQE can assist the hospital in developing its exercise program by creating its multi-year training and exercise schedule, identifying and prioritizing scenarios based on identified hazards, facilitating planning workshops, conducting and evaluating the exercises, preparing after-action reports, and supporting performance improvement activities. DQE can also work with the hospital to develop an exercise that satisfies a particular need or tests a specific capability. For example, an exercise may be developed to test event recognition, management notification, and plan activation procedures. An exercise may also be used to fine-tune incident command capabilities, resource management, and coordination procedures with outside agencies.

Outcome measures provided by DQE can be used by the hospital to validate emergency plans and procedures, examine decision-making processes, evaluate response and recovery capabilities, identify additional training needs, and refine agreements with community partners. Regardless of the client’s need, from a single exercise to a comprehensive exercise program, DQE has the knowledge, experience, and resources to support the hospital on its preparedness journey while satisfying and documenting regulatory compliance requirements.