On Thursday, November 5, Providence Health Care (PHC) staff, volunteers and doctors participated in the organization’s largest and most in-depth functional emergency exercise ever in preparation for the upcoming Winter Olympic Games.

PHC’s St. Paul’s Hospital was the site of a mock mass casualty emergency scene in a two-part exercise that began at nearby Via Rail train station early in the morning with a staged hazmat incident. From there, forty-eight volunteers acting as injured victims arrived at St. Paul’s Hospital for triage, with twenty of them requiring decontamination. Luckily the mock incident resulted in only minor injuries, with “patients” being treated for shock and artificial wounds.

While participating Emergency Room staff readied themselves for a worst-case scenario rehearsal, no “patients” were admitted to the hospital and no major “injuries” were sustained. Members of St. Paul’s Hospital psychosocial team were activated to support staff and volunteers to deal with what would be a traumatic event in the case of a real-life incident.

The hospital portion of the activity occurred in an outside courtyard behind the real emergency department, minimizing the impact of the exercise on real emergency patient care and staffing.

Learnings included the need to improve communication flow between staff in the emergency department and staff in the Emergency Operations Centre (EOC), the need for additional decontamination training for staff and the need for an enhanced overhead paging system.

Located in downtown Vancouver, St. Paul’s Hospital will be the official spectator hospital during the Games. The exercise was an opportunity to validate the hospital’s current response plans to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, explosive (CBRNE) event at all levels.

In conjunction with VANOC, municipal, provincial and federal levels of government developed a three-part exercise program designed to test and validate integrated response within the Lower Mainland in the event of an emergency during the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. This three-part program was broken down into Exercise Bronze (Nov 2008), Exercise Silver (Feb 2009) and Exercise Gold (Nov 2-6, 2009).

Over 100 agencies participated in Exercise Gold during the first week of November including health authorities, police, fire and ambulance, military and all levels of government.

To view photos from the exercise, please click here.