Experiences and Lessons from the Christmas and New Year severe weather events. GCHHS identified multiple challenges to our planning assumptions during the severe weather events. We live in a large metropolitan area and hadn't predicted there would be an occasion where there would be an extended power outages - up to 14 days and the flow on effects requiring management. People with essential medical devices without power and no other option presented to emergency departments for assistance. These presentations then required admission to hospital for people who were not acutely unwell taking up valuable space and decreasing the available bed stock for acutely unwell patients. We also found that as time went on people with essential medical devices without power became unwell and required admission because their condition had deteriorated. We had to come up with novel arrangements to manage this cohort of people including purchasing hotel accommodation and working with our partners within the Local Disaster Management Group and the Department of Housing to secure short term accommodation. We need to capture and plan for alternate to hospital arrangements for these people.
We made arrangements for staff including spaces with hygiene facilities and accommodation in order to preserve the workforce.
We found it was difficult to recall staff from their leave due to the time of year and a lot of areas did not have on call arrangements in place to easily recall staff.
We identified that there are improvements to make with our partners around what Health can assist with during an event. We and our partners - City of Gold Coast Council and the Primary Health Network had undertaken some work with residential aged care facilities and their disaster and business continuity planning but from this incident we can see that work needs to continue.