code blog: tales of a nurse: Internal Disaster
Those aren’t words you want to hear over the loudspeaker of your place of employment.
The alarm sounded, but although it’s usually cleared within a few moments, this time it just kept going. Ding. Ding. Ding. What the heck was going on? The rumors filtered down over a matter of minutes. A doctor who had been on the Floor In Question came down to ICU with stories of patients being evacuated. Huh? If patients are being evacuated, why are you down HERE telling us about it instead of up there? We thought he was full of it, trying to pull our collective legs.
But then we heard the announcement, and it cemented everything he’d said. We were having an Internal Disaster. “This is not a drill.” Soon, we heard our charge nurse’s Vocera chime in: “Please have all evacuation litters and chairs ready to go when the transporters come for them.”
!!!!
This was real! A real, live emergency!
Though she’s being (appropriately) cagey about the cause of the disaster, there are Lessons To Be Learned from reading this.
