Providence Medford emergency response team

Ryan Hutchinson is director of medical imaging at Providence, but he's been serving as their deputy incident commander for the COVID-19 response.

Medical professionals train for all kinds of scenarios, but it's almost impossible to try and train for a global pandemic.

Brian morton spoke with the incident commander at providence medical center about how they utilized disaster training in their response to covid-19.

Bmo: the covid 19 pandemic has forced a lot of medical professionals to make changes they've been trained for, but don't often put into use.

Ryan hutchinson joins us now.

He's the director of diagnostic imaging at providence medford, but he's also serving as the deputy incident commander for the covid19 response.

Thanks very much for being with us.

So tell me a little about the training that you went through that puts you in a position to help out when this pandemic hit.

Ryan: uh, well, there's a place called the center of disaster preparedness in anniston, alabama.

It's a fema sponsored, facility.

They offer multiple classes, including one that's specific to hospital command leadership for a mass casualty incidents.

So, uh, a group of six of us went there late last year and did the training.

And i came back and talk with our teams about how we could implement some more of that training into our emergency preparedness.

So it actually helped us out quite a bit, uh, coming into this, uh, incident.

Bmo: how would you describe the folks you work with adapting to the challenges they were presented with learning what they need to be prepared for the pandemic.

Ryan: i mean, if think they did very well, um, you know, it took a, it took a sort of amount of time for us to realize that, you know, we, we had the tools and the knowledge, uh, based on this training, uh, and just had to figure out how to create a structure to put it into use.

What we did is i happened to be the administrator on call the week that we were going to set up our command center, so i was tasked with setting up the command center, assigning the roles, uh, and, uh, and getting people up to speed.

And so once we had, uh, i guess kind of a forward momentum, then people were jumping on board and, uh, and we're able to, um.

Because think about what they learned and then figure out how to apply it and then how we communicate.

And so as we move through our process, setting up more meetings for, you know, requests for information, reporting on information, uh, and then of course, um, and how to pull in our, our local partners, our county.

Um, you know, our regional resources up in portland and just get everybody talking together and it really smoothed out quickly.

Bmo: ryan hutchinson from providence medford.

We appreciate your training, your help, and helping us out today.

Thanks very much.

All right.