In order to assess the conditions of and prepare Government hospitals for dealing with varied disaster scenarios, the Disaster Management Department has started an initiative initially focusing on the Government Doon medical college hospital. The Disaster Management Department along with the Doon hospital and other linear departments held a preliminary meeting on Monday to address issues related to preparedness of the hospital for various contingencies. On Tuesday, the department officials will visit the hospital to assess its various aspects after which staff of various departments concerned will be given a short term training. After this, a contingency scenario will be provided to the personnel in a mock drill to check the operation of the hospital in such situations.
Addressing the media at the State Emergency Operation Centre (SEOC) here on Monday, the disaster management additional secretary Savin Bansal said that the department periodically conducts mock drills based on the incident response system (IRS) for various disaster scenarios. In order to ascertain the preparedness of Government hospitals in the State for tackling varied medical contingencies, the disaster management department along with the various stakeholders has initiated an exercise as part of which a preliminary meeting was held here on Monday. The aim of the preliminary session was to discuss indicators for the effective performance of Doon hospital during response to any mass casualty, fire disaster or any other eventuality which may happen at any point of time. On Tuesday, the officials of departments concerned will inspect the Doon medical college hospital to assess the scenario there. After this, the personnel of the hospital, police, district administration and others concerned will be provided training for about a week. Following this, a mock drill will be held to check the response of the hospital. This will subsequently be replicated for other government hospitals including district hospitals, joint/base hospitals and eventually the community health centres too. The Doon medical college hospital medical superintendent Dr KK Tamta, disaster management specialist BB Gadnayak and other officials concerned were also among those present in the preliminary meeting held on Monday.