Emergency Response Teams
How are your ERT structured? How often do you do training? How many roles are within the team?
Comments (9)

Depends on what your ERT is for. Are you referring to an ERT strictly for medical emergencies? Or are they also responding to HAZMAT incidents on your property, confined space rescue, etc.?

You should be looking at the Emergency Response NPRM that OSHA sent out in May. This will change the ERT business with a significant increase in regulation.

When I was a site manager at a facility with 400 machinists and assembly employees for Medical. We had Occ Nurses (RN) in the plant 3 hours each. twice per seek. Sometimes if we were lucky they would be on site, but not often enough. We had a DC at the plant 4 hours one afternoon per week (he did ART therapy worth every dime!!!! The employees loved it! I cannot imagine how many Recordables he saved us from!! Never trusted a DC before, but he was a good one).
We were lucky and had three EMTs that were volunteer fireman. WE had one on each shift.
We had >10 First Responders on first shift. I tried to keep 3-4 on the other shifts but that was really tough! I would get them trained and they would come to day (first) shift. That was a struggle. In WI that requires 56 hours of training every two years.
We also had a First Aid Team of 15-20 employees on first shift and 10 on the other shifts. That was a struggle too but not as tough as for First Responders. Those employees had 4 hours of FA training, and 4 hours of CPR and AED Training, I think that was every 2 years too.
My cycle of training was FR on even years and FA training on Odd yeas, always in the Fall.
All were trained in Blood Borne Pathogens annually.
For Emergency Response and EAP we were required to do that once a year along with a "Business Continuation Drill!" That required all managers at the supervisor level to be trained and participate in a drill scenario where a major disaster hit the plant, that would shut down production, per corporate policy. This included just about everything you could imagine, as examples for paying people, getting production back, and suppling product to our OEM customers from other sources! Our Plant Manager had to submit a report once a year on how well we did and what we needed to change. I wrote it and he signed and submitted it!
I had to train everyone at the supervisory level and above in Emergency Response and our Emergency Action Plan.
Hope this helps