Dr. Christopher Freer, chairman of the Emergency Department at Saint Barnabas Medical Center, left, greets Dr. Arie Eisenman, right, his counterpart at the Western Galilee Hospital in Nahariya, Israel, and Pesah Pasko, WGH’s head radiology technician.
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May 7, 2009
Medical staff, local police officers, and emergency medical service responders gathered at Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston on April 24 to hear how one Israeli hospital emergency room handles crisis situations.
Dr. Arie Eisenman, head of the Emergency Ward at Western Galilee Hospital in Nahariya, just six miles from the Lebanon border, described the teaching hospital’s disaster preparedness model — one it has put into use on more than one occasion.
Eisenman was accompanied to Livingston by Pesah Pasko, head technician from the Radiology Department of WGH. The two, on a visit arranged through the UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey, were touring New Jersey medical facilities, including Englewood Hospital, Holy Name Hospital, Valley Hospital, and Hackensack Hospital.
Saint Barnabas arranged the visit through its Office of Emergency Management.
Eisenman’s focus during his time in the States was on emergency room construction and management, looking for models to bring back to his own ER, which is currently being rebuilt.
Pasko, WGH’s head radiological technician, is researching MRI machines as his hospital prepares to buy its first.
Last month’s meeting wasn’t St. Barnabas’ first contact with the Israeli hospital. Last December, two members of the emergency management team went to WGH for a special course in disaster preparedness that it began offering nearly 10 years ago.
The Israelis “are the experts on this,” said Neil Bryant, administrative director in the emergency management department at St. Barnabas.
WGH, a government institution, is known for its 400-bed underground hospital built with private money after a bomb hit the facility in the 1980s. Eisenman described WGH as a “front-line hospital” that during the 2006 Second Lebanon War handled more casualties than any other Israeli medical center.
“Every hospital employee must be accessible 24 hours a day, every day of the week, and be available in case of emergency situations,” he said.
Eisenman described the ruthless triage that accompanies a disaster response.
“You have to clear up the Emergency Room in no time. You have to stop all planned surgical activities…. The head nurse has to call the operating theater and tell them to stop all activity and to be ready. The same with the lab and imaging. Then, we have to call all necessary staff.”
He went on to describe everything from setting up decontamination areas for chemical warfare attacks, to more banal but no less important details like managing the flow of traffic in the emergency room.
‘An eye-opener’
The meeting participants peppered Eisenman with a similarly broad array of questions — from how many supplies to keep on hand to how to move patients out of the ER without notifying other departments.
Chris Ruhren, Saint Barnabas’ assistant vice president, patient care services, leads a tour of the hospital’s burn unit with, from left, Neil Bryant, from the hospital’s Office of Emergency Management, and Israeli visitors Dr. Arie Eisenman and Pesach Pasko.
“We do a lot of the same things but they do things so much more efficiently,” said Leroy Boone, assistant vice president of support services at Saint Barnabas, following the presentation.
Livingston Fire Department Chief Chris Mullin said Eisenman offered “an insight into emergency management they live with every day. We drill on the county level, but hearing what they do — it’s an eye-opener. Probably in the near future we’ll sit down at a safety meeting and discuss what was discussed here and see if there are any kind of improvements we can make, possibly increasing the frequency of our drills.”
Dr. Christopher Freer, chairman of the Saint Barnabas Emergency Department, was impressed with the Israelis’ ability to mobilize emergency staff and resources.
“And also the underground equipment — there wasn’t much down there besides a bed and a stretcher and someone taking care” of the patients, he noted. “They didn’t need high-tech stuff to care for the patients. It was really the staff.”
Eisenman acquired plenty to take away from the visit. He described local emergency rooms as “very sophisticated and modern,” but also acknowledged that he had plenty to share.
“We realized there are some areas where we are more advanced — we were very much surprised at that; it seems we have something to teach.”
And he was “encouraged” to find that many departments around the world confront the same kinds of issues as he and his staff do.
“It was a real occasion to discuss with our counterparts here how to sort things out,” said Eisenman. “It encourages me to know that the problems are not my own, that everybody has the same ones.”
The delegation returned to Israel on April 29.
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