Emergency services staff protection

General chemical awareness and safety should be an integral part of the basic training of all emergency service staff and more specific courses provided for those who are expected to carry out specific tasks. Specific courses should include a realistic understanding of risk, risk-assessment and personal protection and consist mainly of realistic practice to ensure familiarity with equipment and build confidence. Effective response plans should also be translated into operational protocols and role-specific action cards. 

Logistical Support and Facilities. The only specific requirements for the threat category IV are for survey and cleanup equipment such as dosimeters, survey and contamination meters, protective gear, decontamination supplies, and recovery tools at the national level. In several areas, particularly those in which the risk of a transportation accident is high, local response services are equipped with dosimeters and survey meters. If so, training (and periodic refresher training) must be provided, equipment must be periodically verified and calibrated, and the emergency services staff must be provided with valid procedures. 

Security services will be provided for applications to apply appropriate business rules for access control of records based on the identity, roles, and purposes (i.e., business functions), in addition to distributed security services for authentication, authorization, confidentiality, integrity and nonrepudiation, to protect the best interests of stakeholders. Later in this book we will discuss the notion of a stakeholder in healthcare. It suffices here to say that these are the people legitimately involved in healthcare such as the patient, physician, and emergency medical staff. In some definitions stakeholders are the only people who can access the patient record. There are usually a special provisionings for the emergency care staff to access the patient data without an explicit informed consent in the event that the patient is unconscious. 

Within emergency medicine, it is a common perception that chemical incidents are rare events. It has often been quoted in the past that there are approximately 1000 acute chemical incidents per year in England and Wales that may impact human health and that the majority of these events involve less than four casualties. For the purposes of public health, a chemical incident is defined as an event in which there is, or could be, exposure of the public to chemical substances that cause, or have the potential to cause, ill health . Hospital staff and emergency services personnel are considered to be members of the public in this definition. In 2005, the UK Health Protection Agency recorded more than 1000 chemical incidents, and it was estimated that approximately 27,000 people may have been exposed, of whom about 3000 reported with symptoms. It is thought that the actoal numbers may be considerably higher. 

A substantial portion of the budget of most safety and loss prevention professionals allows for the purchase of personal protective equipment for their employees, medical supplies, and professional services, as well as salary and benefits for staff. Virtually all of these costs are fixed but often possess an ongoing expense factor. Additionally, safety and loss prevention professionals are often faced with emergency situations and unforeseen costs requiring specific items on an immediate basis. In essence, safety and loss prevention can be expensive, but methods are available to manage these costs appropriately. 

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