Disaster management in hospital pharmacies is poorly studied and trained. This study assesses the benefit of full-scale simulations to improve hospitals pharmacists’ disaster preparedness in Switzerland Successive full-scale simulations were realized in 4 hospital pharmacies. The full-scale simulations were approximatively 6 months apart. Three scenarios were created by an interprofessional team. Each scenario represented credible regional disasters with approximatively 50 casualties (major road accident, terrorist attacks and internal technical failures, respectively). Four evaluators used evaluation grids to judge participants during the simulation (rating on a scale of 5).
All hospitals performed two runs of simulation and among them one realized a third exercise. The mean duration of all simulations was 3.2 hours. On average, the 4 hospitals responded to 69±6% of the expected actions during the first simulation. Differences between exercise 1 and 2 were observed. The average rate of action achieved increased to 84±7% (p<0.0001). Moreover, the quality of the actions actually performed improved from 3.9/5 to 4.1/5 (p<0.001) and the time to gather command group drastically decreased between the two simulations (from 23 to 5 minutes). The main challenges were communication (reformulation) and management rhythm. The first simulation resulted in the creation of a disaster plan in 3 hospital pharmacies and in the improvement of the existing one in the last one. 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.