Facility Operations
Emergency Management Guide for Nursing Homes
Emergency Management Guide for Nursing Homes
The Emergency Management Guide for Nursing Homes assists nursing home administrators, corporate representatives, owners, and key staff in their efforts to develop and maintain a practical all-hazard emergency operations plan. The guide provides an established format for developing a basic plan, offers direction for developing standard operating procedures for use during an emergency, and addresses specific hazards which may threaten a facility.
This guide is a compilation of national emergency management concepts and practices, not a sample emergency operations plan. Each nursing home's emergency operations plan must indicate what that nursing home will do to protect itself from its hazards with the resources it has or can obtain.
This guide is intended primarily for use by nursing home staff responsible for emergency operations plan development and maintenance. It creates no requirements for any nursing home, and its recommendations may be used, adapted, or disregarded, based on a particular facility's own policies and state law.
Acknowledgements
This guide is issued by the Florida Health Care Association in partnership with the University of South Florida and the Florida Department of Health's Office of Emergency Operations. Funding for the guide's development came through the John A. Hartford Foundation and the FHCA. The planning format is based on the Federal Emergency Management Agency in their Guide for All-Hazards Emergency Operations Planning to be used by jurisdictions at the state and local level. Further, the components set forth in this guide satisfy the basic emergency management requirements of 400, Part II, Florida Statutes, s. 59A-4.126, Florida Administrative Code, as well as the new national recommendations of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Nursing homes may use this guide to supplement guidance they receive from their states.