Disaster Preparedness Center Officially Opens in Utah

SALT LAKE CITY— A new 7,000-square-foot disaster preparedness center in Salt Lake City, Utah, is now officially open, offering certain medical personnel disaster response training. The new Intermountain Center for Disaster Preparedness will be located inside the LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City.

The center will be used to train those specializing in disaster responses, including EMTs, nurses and physicians. The center has been unofficially open for the last year and has conducted 50 trainings for 1,000 people, but April 27 marked the center’s official grand opening, according to Ann Allen, emergency preparedness manager with Intermountain Health Care’s Urban Central Region.

The center is the first hospital-based training center west of the Mississippi River and has 18-patient rooms, medical training mannequins, training classrooms, disaster simulation labs and a secure emergency supply area. All preparedness training is done in a working environment, giving those training real-life situations and first-hand experience dealing with a number of disaster response incidents.

“It’s a real patient room; it’s not make believe,” Allen said. “There’s not a falseness. We’re teaching them in their work environment, which is important.”

Training will help hospital staff members and first responders address and manage emergency situations — whether big or small.

“It doesn’t have to be something so catastrophic,” said Allen. “It’s not just for those big events. It would be really horrible if it really happened, but the things we learn from these drills also help when little things go wrong.”

The training can certainly help in an event of a natural disaster but also smaller situations, such as a patient exposed to radiation, according to Allen.

The center’s grand opening featured an educational symposium for hospital and disaster preparedness specialists, including keynote speaker Dan Diamond, who founded the nation’s first state-affiliated medical disaster response team and has seen disaster relief efforts first hand while working as director of the Mass Casualty Triage Unit at the New Orleans Convention Center during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.