Emergency Preparedness

These days, emergency care must be able to address novel concerns, such as a hospital's preparedness for terrorist attack. Emerging and rapidly changing infectious diseases, such as H1N1, have made infection control a priority for all EDs nationwide.

Evergreen has made a sizeable commitment to emergency preparation in both manpower, planning and supplies.

Clean Air

Since it's not immediately known if people coming into the ED are contagious, the air in the ED waiting room and triage area is exhausted directly to the outside rather than recirculated.

Any air recirculated in the patient treatment areas is first run through a series of cleansing filters...meaning the air inside the building is many times cleaner than the air outside of the building.

Isolation Rooms

If a patient is found to be contagious, or suspected to be contagious, they will be placed in one of the four treatment rooms set up as isolation rooms.

The air in the isolation rooms is also exhausted to the outside after first being run through UV lights and then through a HEPA filtration system.

Decontamination

Two of the isolation rooms are accessible directly from outside the Emergency Department, meaning patients can enter the room, have a decontamination shower and undergo treatment without being brought into the main Emergency Department.

The Emergency Department is set up with an outdoor area that can accommodate decontamination for a large number of patients, in event of a mass contamination.

Our emergency response team has been trained in all aspects of decontamination; this level of training is unusual outside of a military hospital.

Isolation Unit

The patient tower (Silver zone) has two isolation rooms on each floor as well, and one entire 16-bed unit on the eighth floor can be closed off to care for patients during a pandemic event.

Built to Last

Both the Kirkland and Redmond Emergency Departments are "built to last", meaning they will continue to be operational, especially at times when the community needs us most.

Three 1250-kilowatt diesel-fired generators will provide a backup energy source to keep both facilities operational. The buildings also have state-of-the-art fire detection and fire sprinkler systems.

Our Redmond Emergency Department even houses a high-tech Incident Command Center where hospital and city officials can manage a local natural disaster.