A local hospital took the opportunity to vaccinate most of its staff while performing a disaster drill Wednesday. OSF Saint Francis Medical Center executed a three-hour lockdown early in the morning to determine if it could control access to the facility through three main entrances. It also gave the hospital an opportunity to see if it can vaccinate all of its employees.
Troy Erbentraut manages the office of Disaster Preparedness for Saint Francis. He says the drill mimics what would happen during an anthrax threat:
"We'd want to control access to the health care facility so it doesn't cross-contaminate here, and then we'd want to medicate our staff as they came in. You could do anything with that simulation. What we're doing today is giving the flu vaccine and doing restricted access. But you could input any other disaster in there whether it be some kind of hazardous material spill or something like that that you have to control and really have to monitor who comes into our facility to make sure that nobody brings that bad stuff in here."
Erbentraut says the lockdown drill went smoothly. Saint Francis was able to vaccinate nearly 4,000 employees with flu shots as of Wednesday afternoon. That’s out of more than six-thousand staff members. Vaccinations will continue to be distributed through Thursday night.