PORT ARTHUR, Texas — Southeast Texas health care professionals and emergency management coordinators met Wednesday to prepare for hurricane season.
The Southeast Texas Regional Advisory Council (SETRAC) hosted the "Emergency Preparedness Bootcamp", which took place at the Bob Bowers Civic Center in Port Arthur.
The workshop gave free-standing emergency rooms, hospice cares, hospitals and home health care workers the resources they need to support their evacuation plans.
"Focusing on evacuation planning shelter-in-place planning and just that coordination piece with just our local office of emergency management and make sure that their staffed, their facility, their agencies are prepared for any type of disaster, with a focus on hurricane preparedness today," said Fidel Calvillo with SETRAC.
SETRAC'S goal is to bring awareness to emergency resources if facilities are unable to shelter-in-place.
"Our goal is to get them involved in our local response coordination so they understand their is some support when their plans happen to fail," SETRAC said.
Clinical Director of Altus Hospice Crystal Brottem she says she learned how to improve their evacuation plan.
"Getting out as soon as you can, listening, really taking everything seriously even almost to the point of if you feel like you're being over cautious," Brottem said. "You're never over cautious in an event, you never know how it's going to happen. You don't know how everything's going to play out, so you just have to be ready for whatever, have the right resources available that you need."
One of the resources provided at the workshop is the Acadian Mass Casualty Ambulance.
"We can transfer 21 patients in here with four medics and usually in a regular ground ambulance you can carry two max. This gives us the ability to carry more at one time," said Acadian Community Relations Supervisor Butch Holmes.