When disaster strikes, it’s critical to be prepared, and the emergency preparedness sessions at Emergency Nursing 2025 aim to help attendees do exactly that.
One way for an emergency department to be ready for a disaster is with education, protocols, and collaboration with EMS and other teams before an event occurs. The session “Disaster-Proofing the ED: How EMS and Disaster Education Helps Nurses Stay ‘Event-Ready’” will cover how the team at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center in Chicago implemented a series of EMS and disaster preparedness education sessions for ED nurses.
Berenice Simpson, MSN, RN
Because Chicago often hosts major events, like last year’s Democratic National Convention, the team at Advocate realized it needed to be ready to handle mass casualty situations. To do that, the team created drills, protocols and education for specific scenarios, such as mass blood transfusions and triaging huge amounts of people, and other elements of disaster preparedness.
ED and Trauma Manager Berenice Simpson, MSN, RN, will share Advocate’s step-by-step emergency preparedness plan, as well as tools and resources to help attendees implement something similar in their own organizations.
“We’re going to break it down into pieces,” she said. “This can be your starter tool kit to take it back to your team.”
Disasters also come in the form of natural disasters, from floods to wildfires. The session “Preparing Health Care for Climate Disaster: Lessons Learned From a ‘Worst-case Scenario’” will take an in-depth look at how hospitals were affected by Hurricane Ian, which caused mass destruction and deaths when it struck Florida in 2022.
Sarah Warren, BSN, RN
“Health care workers across hospitals not only dealt with losing homes or seeing their cars float away, they were also meeting the crisis while working,” said session speaker Sarah Warren, BSN, RN, executive director and co-founder of the health care worker peer support group Don’t Clock Out.
Warren will share personal stories from front-line nurses who’ve experienced climate disasters and draw on lessons learned from other deadly storms, such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and Hurricane Helene in Asheville, North Carolina. She will lead self-reflection and other activities with session participants and discuss how individual nurses can help prepare not only their organizations but also themselves.
“I’m hoping for a lot of empowerment,” Warren said.
In a disaster, teamwork between groups that may not typically interact is important, too. That’s what the session “United for Readiness: Strengthening Disaster Preparedness Through Military/Civilian Collaboration” will cover as it explores how collaboration among military, uniformed services and civilian sectors can improve disaster response and recovery.
Maj. Jacki Roland, MSN, RN, CEN, TCRN, CPEN
“So many of our military programs are integrated into civilian hospital systems, and it’s a really great opportunity for us to share ideas, share knowledge and make sure that both sides are really ready,” said lead session speaker Maj. Jacki Roland, MSN, RN, CEN, TCRN, CPEN, who herself straddles both worlds, working both as a clinical nurse educator at UCHealth in Colorado and as a military instructor at the Center for Sustainment of Trauma and Readiness Skills St. Louis.
The session’s panelists, which include active-duty military, retired military and reservists, will discuss their approaches to a hypothetical disaster case study. They will also cover the ways nurses can advocate for resources, adapt to varying communication styles, and integrate best practices from both the civilian and military sectors into disaster preparedness.