A drill reveals lessons on evacuating cancer patients

The principle of pushing an exercise to the breaking point often comes up in terms of healthcare emergency management.
Planners from Memorial Hospital in Chattanooga, TN, embraced that idea when they set in motion a multihospital drill that also included local fire and ambulance services.
They created an evacuation scenario in the cancer unit that posed interesting dilemmas, such as moving immunocompromised patients in isolation and patients on chemotherapy drugs that present exposure risks to employees and other patients.