Is Your Hospital Moving? Check Out These Effective Patient Transfer Techniques

Birmingham, Ala.’s Trinity Medical Center successfully and efficiently transferred all 97 of its patients to a new facility. Here are the best practices they adopted to make the complex move drama-free.

Officials Covered All the Bases Before Transfer Day
Everbridge, which has over 2,500 customers around the globe, provided training and hosted conference calls with emergency personnel in the months leading up to the move. Countless meetings were held between departments to ensure everyone was on the same page. Coker also praised hospital executives for staying engaged in the planning process.

The keyword “Grandview” was established and officials worked to get the word out to the public to encourage residents to receive real-time alerts from the Nixle system. Local press outlets ran stories and Coker’s emergency agency posted a steady stream of promotions on social media to alert nearby citizens.

“We chose the keyword of ‘Grandview’ because that was the name of the new hospital, so that was the keyword given to the media and publicized,” Coker says. “And we were able to rapidly get over 700 opt-ins in just a few days. It caught a lot of people’s attention.”

Getting local residents to opt in to receive the Nixle notifications was crucial because of the route chosen for the move. The ambulances carrying patients would be traveling down U.S. highway 280, which is one of the biggest and busiest corridors in Alabama.

Town Prepared as Moving Day Arrives
Both hospitals were fully staffed on Oct. 10, which made a quick transport critical to preserve resources. At approximately 5:30 a.m. that morning, the first ambulance left Trinity. The hospital’s infants were moved first, although later ambulances held multiple types of patients to avoid overloading any one department at Grandview.

As planned, each ambulance was accompanied by a Birmingham fire rescue truck, one Birmingham police escort in front and two police escorts in the back. Each ambulance also had an RN and an EMT on board. “The ambulance transport was actually based on the presidential motorcade. We’d also refer to each ambulance as a package,” Coker explains.

As each “package” approached a major intersection, a Nixle notification would be sent to Birmingham police stationed at the crossing. The stationed officer would briefly stop traffic as the ambulance and its entourage passed through before letting traffic flow normally again.

Officials would also send out a communication as each ambulance left Trinity, which let the nurses at Grandview know they’d have another group of patients arriving in 20 minutes.

“The public got these notifications, hospital employees got this, the media got this and the police and fire personnel got this. So law enforcement at each intersection would know ‘okay, in about five minutes I need to shut down my intersection because they’ll be flowing through,'” Coker says.

Each notification was received in less than 30 seconds. The notifications would say something like “Ambulance package 9 is leaving Trinity.” One by one, ambulances made uneventful trips to Grandview as Trinity staff slowly closed down parts of the hospital. The last ambulance left Trinity before noon, making the move an incredibly effective (not to mention cost-efficient) success.

There Are Many Lessons to be Learned
After a flawless transport of 97 patients (aside from the aforementioned ambulance flat tire), Coker is working to put together a document that other hospitals can refer to during evacuations. “We are breaking this all down now, but we want to publish this and give it to anyone who may need it,” he says.

Among the takeaways from the move was that close cooperation between agencies is key. “We had very close communications with the hospital staff from day one,” Coker says. The constant use of Nixle’s notification services also kept everyone, including members of the surrounding community, updated in real time.

The county plans to use the Everbridge communication platform for internal communications and weather emergency notifications that need to be done on a larger scale, while Nixle’s platform will be used for everyday events like festivals or traffic incidents.

Now that the hard work is over, Coker is working to get as much information out about the move as possible, hoping hospital officials around the country will continue to learn about the experience to better prepare their facilities if a similar move is necessary.

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About the Author

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Zach Winn is a journalist living in the Boston area. He was previously a reporter for Wicked Local and graduated from Keene State College in 2014, earning a Bachelor’s Degree in journalism and minoring in political science.

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