Background: Disaster management in hospital pharmacies is poorly studied and trained for.
Purpose: To assess the benefit of full-scale simulations to improve hospitals pharmacists’ disaster preparedness in Switzerland.
Method: Successive full-scale simulations were realised in four hospital pharmacies. The full-scale simulations were approximatively six months apart. Three scenarios were created by an inter-professional team. Each scenario represented credible regional disasters with approximatively 50 casualties (multiple-vehicle collision, terrorist attacks and internal technical failures, respectively). Four evaluators used evaluation grids to judge participants during the simulation (rating on a scale of 1-5).
Results: All hospitals performed the initial simulation, two completed the second run and a last one realised a third exercise. The mean duration of simulations was 3.3 hours. On average, the four hospitals responded to 69% (±6%) of the expected actions. Differences between exercise one and two were observed. The average rate of action achieved increased from 64% to 79% (p<0.005). Moreover, the quality of these actions improved from 3.9/5 to 4.2/5 for these two hospitals (p<0.005). The first simulation resulted in both hospital pharmacies to create a disaster plan and train their staff on it.
Conclusion: This study highlights the value of full-scale disaster simulations for hospital pharmacies. The number of correct actions increased significantly. Globally, the full-scale simulations have improved the preparedness of the hospital pharmacies involved and promoted staff awareness. Results of further simulations in the four hospitals and others are warranted to confirm these preliminary observations.