How much flexibility should hospitals build into their response plans?
They should go back and see how their plans lined up with what happened with H1N1. For some of the states and some facilities, it didn’t go the way they thought it was going to go. Everybody thought a pandemic would begin overseas, and so you would have X amount of weeks to prepare for its arrival in the United States. Of course, that’s not at all what happened. Your plans need to allow flexibility. Plans need to outline everything, but they shouldn’t be rigid. You need to look at what went well and what didn’t go well, and then start making changes. Part of what allows flexibility is to build in triggers to implement certain aspects of the plan. That way, you can watch what happens and when it hits a certain trigger, then you need to implement it. This article first appeared in the August 2009 issue of Materials Management in Health Care.
