A hospital disaster plan is measured in minutes. Not in the number of annexes, nor in how well it came through the last audit. It is measured by how long the hospital takes to go from «something has happened» to «the team is where it needs to be».
And in that interval, it is almost never the plan that fails. What fails is everything that comes before the plan.
Where the time actually goes
When you reconstruct a real activation, the breakdown of time is usually counter-intuitive. The decision to activate is made quickly: that is what the criteria are for, and whoever is on call knows them. What eats up the minutes is everything that follows.
Reaching people. The plan says which departments are activated and with what duties. It does not always say who is reachable that night. That information may sit in a rota that changes every week, in a printed list, or in the supervisor’s head.
Calling one by one. Someone has to pick up a phone and dial. If there are fifteen people and each call takes ninety seconds between dialling, waiting, explaining and confirming, the last person finds out long after the first. If several do not answer, you have to decide on the spot who to call instead.
Knowing who is coming. Ten minutes in, whoever is coordinating may still not know how many people are on their way. The decisions that follow — requesting external support, diverting patients or raising the activation level — are made without a complete picture.
This is not necessarily an organisational failure. It is what happens when a procedure designed to coordinate hundreds of people is run with tools designed to coordinate three.
What changes when the alert is automated
At Hospital General Universitario Gregorio Marañón, digitalising the Disaster Plan makes it possible to activate protocols involving more than 1,000 people and to launch the process in seconds. The change is not in the plan: it is that the alert is no longer a manual task.
The alert goes out at once and across several channels. Email, SMS, voice call and messaging are combined to improve the chances of reaching people. Nobody has to decide in the moment how to contact each person.
If the primary contact does not confirm, the system escalates. Roles can be defined with primary and backup contacts in order. When someone does not respond within the expected time, the alert continues without depending on another person noticing the silence.
Whoever coordinates sees the count in real time. How many people have received the alert, how many have confirmed and who is still not responding. That dashboard turns the first minutes into actionable information.
The record matters too
There is one part that is invisible during the activation and shows up the next day: the report.
Every disaster plan activation ends in a review: what was done, in what order, how long it took and what did not work. Reconstructing that from the memories of twenty people and a duty logbook takes time, and the result is always approximate.
When the alert and the execution are recorded with timestamp, owner and evidence, the report is practically written by the time the activation closes. It helps you spot that one department is consistently slower, that a contact has not been updated in months, or that a phase of the plan needs revising.
It also makes drills measurable. Without a record, a drill tells you whether it went well or badly. With a record, it shows you where it got stuck and how long it took to resolve.
The figures in this case come from the project page published by VES. Before distributing this article, the hospital’s authorisation for editorial use must be confirmed.
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