Unions

What If the Bug Bites?

By Kursty McKenzie

Health workers are planning contingencies for the Millennium Bug. Just in case...

For the past year Alex Warner has spent her working life playing the "what if" game. What if the millenium bug strikes our health services? What if older computers read the two-digit 00 date as 1900 instead of 2000 and causes them to malfunction or crash? What if power goes off, the water supply is cut, the lifts stop, phones fail...

As the Year 2000 Project Coordinator for South-Eastern Sydney Area Health Service, Alex is responsible for contingency and disaster recovery planning for 11 hospitals and a full-time staff equivalent of 12,000 people. The trained nurse, who moved into nursing and staff education then accreditation and quality improvement coordinating before taking on the Y2K project says that once you accept the unknowns, it's just a matter of preparing for anything and everything.

"We've had two parallel processes operating across the area," she explains. "One is the testing and rectification of all equipment to ensure Y2K compliance. In that area we're reliant on vendors and suppliers for upgrades and installation. We had hoped to be ready by the end of June, and although there are some delays, there's nothing to cause great concern. The other area is my responsibility - looking at dependency on essential services in every department in every hospital, working out what effect the loss of those services would have and what coping procedures we can put in place."

Services demanding the closest scrutiny are electricity, telecommunications, medical gases, town gas, water, information management systems and essential supplies. Based on dependency, every department is preparing a plan to be put into action in the event of the loss of any or all of the services. "Not every department has to address every service," Alex explains. "The area-wide food service, for example is dependent on town gas, but they don't have to worry about the loss of medical gas. The wards, however, don't have to address the impact of the loss of town gas, as that reliance is further up the food chain."

To settle the obvious anxieties, Alex points out that all hospitals have back up generators. During the past year, the main power has been turned off in each hospital and all these generators have been tested to full capacity on weekdays. "It has been a tremendously useful exercise," Alex says. "The emergency power operates from red power points. So staff have not only identified what is critical equipment, but they've also tested that equipment on the red power points so they know that everything will still work. Of course it would be on a reduced capacity so while the ventilators in ICU would still be working, we wouldn't necessarily have a photocopier. Most of the biomedical equipment of course has battery back-up, so it would operate even if the emergency power failed."

Other contingencies the planning has addressed include use of miners' head lamps as hands-free lighting for nursing staff in the event of a blackout, two-way radios to compensate for telecommunications problems, prioritising the distribution of water stored in the hospitals' rooftop holding tanks - operating suites, ICU and haemodialysis would take preference over areas where water is not so critical.

"We are priority customers," Alex adds. "Sydney Water would have tankers outside in hours if such a thing were to occur. In the process of this exercise, some suggestions have been knocked on the head. Storing water in sinks and baths in the wards is, for instance, not necessary as the tanks will cover us. The idea of placing medications in Eskies was also dismissed because the advice from pharmacy is that many drugs don't need refrigeration. If they do, it would be better to keep them in the fridge and reduce opening the doors than put them in an Esky where the melting ice would subject them to changing temperature."

NSW Health points out that similar programmes are underway in every Area Health Service across the state. They are collaborating with health services in other states and New Zealand to ensure patient protection in every health care organisation. "The Y2K planning has really served as a focus for preparing for all sorts of disasters - wild storms, bushfires, earthquakes and water contamination," a spokesperson for the NSW Department of Health says. "We've some experiences over the past few years to highlight the potential problems. The Victorian gas explosion, for instance, emphasised the problems of running hospitals and nursing homes in the middle of winter without environmental and water heating, or gas for cooking. Even if nothing happens from Y2K, it will have been a very useful exercise in terms of disaster preparation."

This article is listed from The Lamp, the journal of the NSW Nurses Associtaion

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»	Council Sets Benchmarks for Vizard Deal
»	Steggles Treats Workers Like Chooks
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»	International And Community Groups Oppose Reith�s Bill

»	Guest Report
»	Sport
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»	Piers Watch

»	Country Labor Asks Question
»	The Ombudsman Replies
»	Confessions of a German Call Centre Agent
»	WorkCover Off the Track

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