Photo : Getty images/Vetta/Pawel Gaul

Roslyne Schulman (Photo courtesy of Roslyne Schulman)

Ten years later, those images remain engrained in the country's psyche, despite the work that has followed to rebuild structures and reestablish lives.

Katie Brewer, RN, BSN (Photo courtesy of Katie Brewer)

Regardless of the source — a terrorist act, a natural disaster, or disease pandemic — hospitals, nurses, therapists, first responders, and doctors are better armed with the tools they need to react so they can provide care.

Just as the healthcare industry has been permanently altered, so has the climate changed for the healthcare traveling industry. Mobile professionals are charged with the task of staying informed about disaster plans wherever the job takes them. They come with the understanding that teamwork is paramount, and that their quick reaction to immediate emergencies can mean the difference between life and death.

Putting it into practice

Preparing for a disaster takes more than just creating a plan, experts say. To truly test a plan's viability, hospitals across the nation conduct disaster drills to assess how staff respond during an emergency.

According to Roslyne Schulman, director for policy at the American Hospital Association, nearly all hospitals in the country currently employ some type of incident management system that outlines a command structure in the event of an emergency.

"When they do drills and exercises they usually stand up their incident command system and they practice what their roles would be in a disaster," she says.

Often, area hospitals also join emergency forces during drills with other emergency resources in the community, such as police or fire departments. Katie Brewer, RN, MSN, a senior policy analyst with the American Nurses Association, says these joint exercises are often crucial because they allow for different entities to hone their skill in a joint environment.

"They've really done, I think, a better job of making regional and interagency coordination a priority in a lot of these trainings," Brewer says.

Brewer herself has played a significant role in creating the emergency plan now used at the Arlington County Health Department in Virginia. Before joining the American Nurses Association, she was as a public health nurse at the health department and served on a public health emergency response team.

Drawing from that experience, Brewer says one of the keys to a successful emergency plan is teamwork.

"Part of the perspective and part of the mindset of disaster preparedness is that everybody needs to be prepared to do any kind of job," she says. "Just because you are a nurse doesn't mean that you would be doing what you'd normally do as a nurse in that preparedness response."