Hospital Evacuation

This 2014 edition of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (MDPH) Hospital Evacuation Toolkit was developed by our team in collaboration with the MDPH Office of Preparedness and Emergency Management. The toolkit is meant to serve as a resource for hospitals to prepare their own comprehensive evacuation plans, and also to review their provisions and planning for sheltering in place. The toolkit draws from the extensive literature review, review of hospital plans, interviews with hospitals that have had to evacuate, other activities that occurred in preparation for the MDPH statewide hospital evacuation exercise program, and from lessons learned during the execution and evaluation of the exercise series.

This guide contains organized and systematic guidance on how to consider the many factors that bear on the decision to order an evacuation. It is designed to provide hospital evacuation decision teams with organized and systematic guidance on how to consider the many factors that bear on the decision to order an evacuation, and to assist decision teams in identifying some of the special situations, often overlooked, that may exist in their facility or geographic area that could affect the decision to evacuate.