Peterborough City Hospital staff prepare for bomb threats

The month long campaign will focus on a different theme each week, and include all the various plans that the Trust has in place to cope with any kind of emergency that could involve an unusually high number of casualties or threaten the safe running of the hospital. These include incidents such as major transport accidents like train or multi-car pile-ups, chemical incidents, a flu pandemic or even a large fire.

“People assume that smaller cities are unlikely to ever witness extreme emergency situations.

Celia Kendrick, Head of Resilience and Emergency Preparedness said: “Unfortunately, we just never know when our services will be required on that level and so we make it a priority to ensure all of our staff are fully trained and understand the requirements from them and their teams, in the event of a major incident.”

“It’s an awful lot of information to retain.

“We understand, and hope that it’s unlikely we will ever need to use it either, but it is absolutely imperative every member of staff is familiar with what they need to, do so running a campaign like this is very worthwhile.”

Staff will be invited to a live demonstration to look at the new decontamination unit in action and they can look around one of the large equipment vehicles that are deployed to provide additional hospital equipment in the case of excessive numbers of patients being affected.

Specialist training will look at potential bomb threats and suspect packages and a competition will even be held at the end of July to test how closely staff have been listening.