The New York Yankees are one of the greatest teams in professional baseball, and until recently, also had a legendary manager: Joe Torre. But even Torre didn't go it alone - he had a batting coach, a pitching coach and trainers, among other helpers.
In baseball, you'd never even think of leaving the manager on the bench without assistance. But we do that in hospital incident management, expecting our leader to manage the World Series, so to speak, at a moment's notice - with only a few sandlot games and a job action sheet under his or her belt.
Hospitals don't run like fire departments, and hospital leadership doesn't use the Incident Command System (ICS).
Fire departments utilize the ICS on every call; it's their standard operating procedure, just as it is for emergency medical services (EMS). Hospitals, however, only use it during a disaster, which is a federal standard. But using it only during disaster scenarios leads to inconsistent and potentially weak command centers. Those in charge of hospital preparedness agree that an atmosphere of confusion surrounds hospital command centers in terms of job descriptions and position-specific roles of incident command, such as planning section chief and operations section chief.
When a facility looks at its response assets, it usually only looks internally. Being part of an overall health system, however, one facility has access to more assets than just its own inventory - but may not realize it. This leads us to the hospital incident management team concept: What if, like wild land firefighters, we could develop an incident management team that could deploy to an affected facility and assist in command center operations?
At Sanford Health in Sioux Falls, S.D., we've done just that.
Developing the Team