How ER24 drills for emergencies before they happen

Disasters strike without warning. ER24 conducts regular emergency drills with corporate, government, and community partners to ensure swift, coordinated responses – reinforcing its commitment to safety and quality care when every second counts.

“Emergency preparation is an ongoing process,” says Peter van der Spuy, ER24’s General Manager Quality Assurance and Support Services. “There are always new clients entering the industry as well as new divisions of existing services. We provide training whenever needed.” As part of his job, Van Der Spuy manages plans and preparations for responding to national and regional disasters.

“Through our regional managers, we maintain critical relationships with all relevant bodies, and together with us, they’re required to complete periodic emergency drills and exercises,” he explains. “Training can include many agencies, whether it’s for mandatory workplace health and safety drills or for organisations wanting to improve their skills in a specific drill.”

Communication and coordination are key

Emergency drills and procedures help national and regional organisations stay prepared, says Van Der Spuy. This includes everything from evacuations to handling mass casualty incidents. “We work with provincial coordinating centres, provincial emergency medical services (EMS), private EMS, fire services and associated bodies, including the South African Police Services (SAPS), throughout the country.” By working closely with these organisations, ER24 combines its communication, skills, and expertise. This preparation helps ensure emergencies are handled effectively.

Ultimately, emergency readiness comes down to communication and coordination, Van Der Spuy explains. “It’s all about communication in any form, whether it’s talking to people, meeting people, inter-radio communication skills, dispatch response, or coordinating centres. That’s where training plays a major role – building relationships, putting names and faces to incidents and maintaining professional integrity across the board for respective disciplines. It’s about building a well-organised command system that brings different teams together, relying on strong communication.”

Having these strong communication processes helps ER24 to provide fast, effective emergency care that fulfils its mandate of “real help, real fast”. By sharing emergency skills and knowledge with organisations, ER24 ensures patients receive seamless care from first responders to hospital treatment.

What happens during a drill?

The type and number of drills depend on each organisation. Scenarios covered could be anything from fire evacuation drills from a multistorey office building to preparing a school for an attack from a swarm of bees. “At schools, we’ll discuss the best safety procedures and give a talk and show-and-tell about the right and the wrong things to do,” says Van Der Spuy. For children, it’s important to be prepared early on and so it becomes a teaching and learning experience.

“Corporates may have mandatory evacuation drills, or there are the types of drills that we’ll set up,” he continues. “Here we coordinate everything and work with actual occupational health and safety officials while performing our role as emergency response teams.”

ER24 also partners with the Eyes and Ears Initiative (E2), a collaboration between SAPS, Business Against Crime South Africa, and security and law enforcement agencies. “They run lot of shows, evacuation drills and training stations nationwide. We work with local and regional groups to showcase our medical support and explain what we can do.”

Managing emergency situations

ER24 responds to disasters of all sizes, Van Der Spuy explains. “We engage with many small communities like crime prevention forums, local policing groups, small civil defence groups, or farming groups, and we recognise that a minor emergency for us might be a major crisis for others. That’s why we tailor our drills to fit each group’s needs and the specific area they operate in. For example, there may be agricultural or industrial incidents, so we do exercises and preparations for that on a local level.”

A recent example of a larger scale disaster is the series of building fires in Johannesburg. “In an event of this magnitude we get a large number of patients at once, turning it into a mass casualty event that requires specialised care,” he says. “Firefighters work under tough conditions, and we must find the right burn centres for multiple patients with different burn injuries.”

This is where prior training comes into play, says Van Der Spuy. “Cases like these put a lot of pressure on our Contact Centre. The training, coordination, and knowing who we’ve spoken to can help prevent a single hospital from being overwhelmed with more patients than it can handle. That’s why we use our bed bureau, which is updated 24/7, to make sure patients are sent to hospitals with available space. In the end, it all comes down to communication and coordination.”