Disasters are not planned, they happen at random times and often when no one is expecting them.

That’s why first responders and the medical staff at Vaughan Regional Medical Center do everything they can to prepare for a worst-case scenario, including conducting a community-wide drill.

“Our regulatory agencies require one community-wide disaster drill a year,” said Anita Ellison, a staff nurse at Vaughan Regional Medical Center and emergency preparedness coordinator for the hospital. “That involves not only the hospital’s preparedness but also the community’s.”

This year, Ellison and Rhonda Abbott, the Dallas County EMA director, worked together to come up with what scenario the staff would be working with.

Tuesday morning, members of the Selma Fire Department, Selma Police Department, Dallas County EMA and a Vaughan Regional nurse discussed what precautions to take if a bus overturned in Dallas County.

“You plan and plan and plan for these types of things, but you have to put those plans in action,” Ellison said. “We like to do that before something like this actually happens, so that we can define areas of improvement. If we need to change processes, we can do that before the actual event occurs.”

Different ideas were tossed around the room about what to do in each unique situation, and what the job of each individual would be.

“We have had bus accidents in our community before, and so that’s one reason that we chose that,” Ellison said. “That has happened. And we wanted to just test changes and processes that we had made from those actual drills, to make sure that everything worked as it should.”

While the different departments were brainstorming solutions to the problem, the staff at the Vaughan emergency room was acting out the drill, practicing what they would do in a real circumstance.

Abbott said the drills are necessary and help to improve communications between departments and better prepare everyone.

“It’s clearly a way that we can all come together, and we can identify short falls. We can see some of our strengths — it helps us to move forward in planning and preparing for different situations that could occur in our county,” Abbott said.

“It’s easy to put it on paper, but then when you get people in the room … there’s a wealth of information that each person has. [When you] share that information, it just builds stronger ties and it makes better plans.”

Both Ellison and Abbott agreed that everything went well, and they are glad to have been able to work through the drill.

“I think that everything went well today, and I think that everyone gained something from it,” Abbott said. “Now our job is to move forward with what we’ve learned.”