Inside Duke Medicine

First Person: Jessica Thompson

This month, we sit down with Jessica Thompson to discuss emergency incident planning. Thompson, a hospital administrative fellow, was named director of emergency preparedness and planning on March 17.

Tell us about your new job.

The new role entails emergency preparedness for Duke Hospital plus also working with the other hospitals in the health system. Here at the hospital, my main goal over the next couple of months is to get back to the basics—make sure our training is where it needs to be.

What else are you working on?

We have a new training module on the new Hospital Incident Command System, or HICS. That’s a new name—everyone should be familiar with HEICS, but the “e” for emergency is gone. Which means it’s not just for emergencies. It’s for any type of incident that that needs a coordinated, organized response.

Give an example.

In the past when you heard HEICS, you thought emergency—fire, floods, mass casualty event. HICS can be used for anything that needs coordination—it could be a move. When we moved to the new Emergency Department, we used HICS.

Why is it important to prepare for emergencies?

I look at it like sports—you play the way you practice. If you just go out to a game and you haven’t practiced, you’re not going to be that great at it. If you’ve practiced, and an incident does come, you can rely on that knowledge. But remember, just because we prepared doesn’t mean we’re going to be 100 percent, the best—but it does mean we will be a lot better than if we didn’t prepare.

You’re saying that being ready for crisis is one of our jobs.

It’s about our responsibility to the community we serve. The community relies on us to be prepared, to be thinking of these things, because they are going to be coming to us when incidents occur.

It seems this philosophy applies at home, too.

Absolutely. I have a preparedness binder at home. It has all my insurance documents; it has my emergency contact numbers and what my fiancé and I should do in an emergency.

—Interview by Mark Schreiner