Earthquakes bring emergency planning into focus

(Inside Aotea, April 2011)

Dr Karen Wood, Aotea Pathology, Chief Executive

It's been a start to the New Year like no other -- the earthquakes in Christchurch and Japan have been huge reminders of the tremendous power of nature and the damage it can wreak.

Our thoughts recently have been with friends, family and professional peers in Christchurch as they work to get their everyday lives and businesses back on track.

Aotea Pathology offered support and assistance to the two community pathology labs in Christchurch, as both were in quake affected areas and have been having quite a job getting up and running again.

The quakes also focused our minds, here at Aotea, on our own emergency planning. We have long had robust emergency management plans for the immediate safety of our staff and patients.

Following the massive shake in Christchurch, we are now reviewing those plans to ensure they are still appropriate if such a shake should hit our region.

One immediate step we took was to check with the landlord of our central Wellington laboratory about the safety of the building we occupy.

The lab is on the 5th, 6th and 7th floors of a 9 storey building, and we were pleased to receive an assurance from the landlord that the building has been earthquake proofed.

A key part of our emergency planning is ensuring we are still able to offer essential services, even under adverse conditions, to doctors who could be faced with a range of disease and injury that they might not normally see in their routine work -- for example, from the effects of contamination and people in close living arrangements.

The Japanese earthquake has given us clear insights into how we will need to work.

Ryuki Kassai, a Japanese medical professor in a quake affected area, writing after the quake, said that a key lesson he saw was a need to get information networks running as quickly as possible for good collaboration with officials, police and other medical staff.

While it is terribly sad to think of all the hardship many tens of thousands of Japanese people are going through, we are absorbing all the information we can from their experiences to help ensure that following any major emergency in Wellington, we can continue to provide pathology services to support essential primary care throughout the region.