Ingrained education readied workers for disaster

With a tornado on its resume, a Georgia hospital gives you advice

It's one thing to fine-tune your tornado plan after a solid drill. It's quite another to have the experience of living through an actual twister tearing through your building.

Although safety committee members would never want to test their storm strategy that way, the staff of Sumter Regional Hospital in Americus, GA, learned firsthand how its plan worked after a tornado hit the facility March 1.

All of the patients and employees survived, says Susie Fussell, the hospital's vice president of nursing, who also is in charge of risk management.

Everyone involved remained remarkably calm and orderly during the evacuation of the hospital, including patients' families, who stayed in their places and waited for instructions despite the chaos and severe building damage.

"I don't want to imply it was smooth sailing from the beginning," Fussell says. "But understand, there were no [government] rules to go by-there was not a template for state response."