On 3–6 June 2024, WHO/Europe, together with the WHO Country Office in Lithuania, will convene a national training of trainers to strengthen Lithuanian capacity to assess hospital safety and resilience against emergencies, with a special emphasis on radiation hazards.
This event is being organized in conjunction with the Health Emergency Situations Centre (ESSC) of the Ministry of Health of Lithuania and will be supported by national experts from the country’s Radiation Protection Centre.
Participants will include chief doctors and nurses from the major hospitals in the country, specialists in hospital critical systems such as biomedical engineers, and professionals from the ESSC.
They will engage in training sessions covering the application of the Hospital Safety Index (HSI) tool, which is used to assess hospitals’ safety and vulnerabilities, make recommendations on necessary actions, and promote low-cost/high-impact measures for improving safety and strengthening emergency preparedness. The HSI is designed to collect information about structural safety, non-structural safety and the disaster management capacities of a hospital. The participants will also pilot in Lithuania a Hospital Preparedness Checklist for Radiation Emergency Response, which looks at hospital safety in the context of radiation hazards, based on the principles of triage, decontamination and management of patients.
The training will include a practical component, which will give participants the opportunity to practice using the tools in a real hospital environment.
In addition to familiarizing the participants with these tools and ensuring that they can carry out hospital safety assessments, the training is designed to enable participants to cascade the knowledge learned and implement the training in their own communities.
This training builds on the country office’s initial training on hospital safety in 2023 and is in line with the initiative to strengthen hospital safety and emergency preparedness across the country, ultimately improving the availability of and access to health care during times of disaster. It comes as part of WHO/Europe’s priority to strengthen hospital safety across the European Region and a series of activities to improve the preparedness of health facilities for emergencies.