Hospital incident command: First responders or receiving centers?

Area of Science:

• Emergency Management
• Healthcare Administration
• Disaster Preparedness

Background:

• The standard hospital incident command system (HICS) has limitations in complex incident management.
• Integrating emergency operations center (EOC) principles offers a potential improvement for hospital incident management systems (HIMS).

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose and evaluate a conceptual model of an alternative HIMS that integrates EOC concepts.
• To compare the proposed HIMS model against the traditional HICS model in terms of knowledge and user satisfaction.

Main Methods:

• A quasi-experimental study was conducted at a level I trauma center.
• Two tabletop incident scenarios were used to compare HIMS and HICS.
• Participants (n=16) completed post-exercise surveys assessing knowledge of reporting structure and user satisfaction using a Likert scale.

Main Results:

• Participants using the HIMS model correctly answered reporting structure questions 63.75% of the time, compared to 35% with HICS (p=0.001).
• End-user satisfaction was significantly higher with HIMS (87.5%) than with HICS (33.5%).

Conclusions:

• The proposed HIMS model, integrating EOC framework, demonstrates superior performance in improving reporting structure knowledge and user satisfaction.
• Further research is necessary to validate the HIMS model and standardize its design for broader application in hospital incident management.