Grindlay on disasters

The DFTB team have teamed up with APLS to share the videos from their Paediatric Acute Care Conferences. These videos have never been open access before, so if you weren’t able to attend the conferences, then now’s your chance to catch up.

The PAC Conference is run each year by APLS and consists of presentations on a range of topics relevant to paediatric acute and critical care.

Joanne Grindlay is an Emergency Physician at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. She has been an APLS instructor for 13 years and has instructed on disaster-related courses such as MIMMS and Emergo-train. She has an interest in disaster response, both locally and internationally, is actively involved in disaster preparedness at RCH and is a member of the Disaster Subcommittee of the ACEM.

In this video Dr Grindlay shares her experience on disaster management and how we can prepare our own disaster response.

Key messages:

• • Australia has frequent disasters – floods, bushfires, cyclones, heatwaves, avian flu
  • Little preparedness is aimed specifically at children
  • Children do not carry identification
  • Empower junior staff to focus on patient care to allow seniors to focus on the bigger picture
  • Consider patient tracking
  • All normal rules apply e.g. appropriate analgesia – this shouldn’t be skipped because of the situation
  • Think about the psychological impact on the children on the environment they are being treated in
  • In a paediatric hospital, you may need to treat the adults that are with them for minor injuries – this is better than separating kids from their carers