Emergency Management: Wound Closure and Early Stabilization

In the perspective of a business organization, Emergency Management is an organizational function in charge of creating workplace policies to reduce a company’s vulnerabilities to different hazards and disasters. The function of emergency managers is to educate everybody in their organization on how to handle different emergencies and to monitor different conditions within the workplace that may be a cause of hazard.

Emergency management may be different depending on the entity establishing it. Whatever the size of the organization, emergency management will involve four stages, namely:

• Mitigation. Mitigation involves analyzing all the risks and hazard factors within the workplace and investing in ways to reduce or eliminate possible risks. Mitigation includes making sure that all the physical aspects of the workplace are up to standards and have passed the different government regulations and codes. Examples of mitigation are investing in firefighting and fire prevention equipment, making sure that all fire escapes are accessible and that city engineers regularly check the building’s foundation.
• Preparedness. The next stage involves the continuous planning, organizing, and training of personnel who will take the lead in emergency cases. This may include training all personnel on basic to advanced first aid and basic life support systems. Examples of which are Early Stabilization of people who are severely injured and keeping everybody within the vicinity calm and collected. Preparedness will also include being in contact with different medical or healthcare facilities that will be dedicated to your organization for emergencies.
• Response. A response will include the mobilization of the key personnel who are tasked to lead specific emergencies. A company may have assigned different response teams to lead different types of emergencies. The response stage may also involve core emergency services such as ambulance crews and paramedics for extreme situations. For example, a factory worker gets badly wounded from a machine malfunction. Emergency responders within the organization will perform Wound Closure procedures and keep the patient stable until ambulance crews arrive. Without Early Stabilization, the wounded patient may suffer from shock, which may lead to panic and even death.
• Recovery. The last stage of emergency management is recovery. Recovery deals with issues and decisions after dealing with an emergency. As with the example of the wounded patient, recovery will involve all the decisions concerning that employee after he has been stabilized at the hospital. This will involve decisions on whether to compensate him for the accident and whether or not to maintain his position or move him to another less hazardous area.