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Emergency Preparedness for Laundries Takes Planning

Tabletop exercises valuable, according to hospitality, healthcare linen sources

ATLANTA — Emergencies, such as natural disasters, happen without warning. These disasters can slow or even stop a laundry’s production if an emergency plan isn’t in place.

During the Industry Chat educational session at the Clean Show here in 2015, three panelists—Carolyn Christmas, executive director of environmental services, Wellstar Health System, Marietta, Ga.; Bryna Mason, Walt Disney World Textile Services, Orlando, Fla.; and William Turner, environmental services director at the LaGrange (Ga.) Medical Center—discussed several audience-submitted topics.

However, the one topic that generated quite a bit of interest was emergency preparedness and the value of conducting tabletop exercises—discussion-based sessions during which team members meet in an informal classroom setting to discuss their roles during an emergency and their responses to a particular emergency situation—in order for laundries to be as prepared as possible to keep processing and delivering clean linens.

Mason says that being in Florida means that hurricanes do come through the area once in a while. One of the things she says WDW Textile Services looks at is redundancy with the options the resort has available in the area.

“We are owned and operated by Walt Disney World, and so we have processes set up with other laundry facilities that if something is to happen with our plant that they would assist us,” says Mason. “We also, as a company, look at what that means to us.”

She notes that the company has established all the necessary processes with its outside sources.

“Because we’re such a large facility, we have to be sure they’re able to handle it, or handle some of it,” says Mason. “To this day, knock on wood, we have not had to use [other laundries for major disasters], but if we do have situations where equipment breaks and so on, our outside partners, local laundries, have helped us with that.”

Christmas says that WellStar has conducted tabletop exercises to help ensure linen supply continues for the healthcare facility in an emergency.

“Even though we have our own laundry, there are also other laundries within the city that provide laundry,” she says. “They are outside the facilities, and we have partnerships throughout the city with them, in addition to our linen providers and the things that they do.”

WellStar had a tabletop exercise in early April to look at all of the logistics and the infrastructure at the facility’s laundry, along with partner facilities. Christmas says staff discussed how the facilities could support one another in situations, such as having the limitation of not being able to make deliveries for several days.

“It was an interesting awareness of some of the things that we hadn’t thought about, because even though you may have a program in place, you don’t know what you don’t know until you’re faced with it,” she says. “It most certainly gave us an opportunity to look at a number of different things to make certain that we’re able to provide those laundries within our system.”

Christmas says that WellStar had the opportunity to utilize its emergency linen processes last year during a snowstorm and ice storm. She says the healthcare facility was challenged in terms of being able to transport linens.

“One of the things that we have done and had in place for all of our facilities is a three-day backup supply, because we don’t really anticipate things going beyond that timeframe,” says Christmas. “With the infrastructure that we have and the facilities that we have responsibility for, our laundry was able to get out prior to that and make certain that all of the facilities were well-stocked and prepared for that.”

Turner says that LaGrange has to conduct a certain number of tabletop exercises per year, especially in terms of partnerships with other laundries.

During a recent tabletop, the group discussed the topic of who are the “essential employees” that need to come into the facility during an emergency. Turner says that they learned that the essential employees are going to be laundry workers and housekeepers, because there are no surgeries going on.

“In that tabletop, it was an eye-opener,” he says. “We basically try to get by with the bare minimum, but sometimes cleaning and providing these services are overlooked. We did learn something different in our tabletop.”

Another idea that came out of LaGrange’s last tabletop was that employees should bring in what they need, having a bag packed, even to the point of bringing some food in with them.

After the snow and ice storm last year, Christmas says that one of the laundry managers compiled a list, with input from others, for packing these specific items and keeping them in car trunks to be prepared for an emergency situation.

Mason says that Walt Disney World Textile Services asks for volunteers to work during emergencies because it knows that the laundry has to keep going.

“We’re still going to have guests in our hotel and usually if there is a natural disaster and people are staying there and the airports are closed, they would be there a little longer, and we still need to, as long as our trucks can go on the road, we need to have people there to do the linen,” she says. “We also make accommodations for our volunteers and their families and their pets.”

There are many considerations that need to be made when creating an emergency preparedness plan. Tabletop discussions and other strategy sessions can better prepare a laundry to keep up production on textiles when disaster strikes.

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(Image licensed by Ingram Publishing)

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