Your facility is required to conduct two resident elopement drills per year.
Let’s review how to conduct a drill and ways to document the drill so your facility meets this AHCA regulation.
The purpose of conducting an elopement drill is to make sure that all your staff is familiar with their role, in the event of an elopement. If your elopement policy and the procedure are well written, then all of your staff duties should be written out and staff can simply follow policy and procedure.
Let’s look at what you should do to conduct an elopement drill and properly document it:
Firstly, have a meeting with your staff and go over your elopement policy and procedures and review what everyone’s duties are.
For example:
Direct care staff search all rooms and common areas
Administration or Designated Staff searches the immediate neighborhood
Administration or Designated Staff calls 911
Administration or Designated Staff call contact person and physician
Administration or Designated Staff completes an ‘adverse incident report’, as well as a ‘facility incident report’.
Once this meeting has taken place, conduct your elopement drill. When conducting an elopement drill, it’s up to you as the administrator or manager to decide how you want to conduct it. In the case that you have a positive outcome and the drill’s potential eloped person is found, you may want to use a specific staff member and instruct that staff member to go hide out in the location of the facility and instruct the other staff to look for them.
With this drill, only the mock phone calls to the contact person and primary DR will need to be done, along with a regular incident report.
When conducting an elopement drill with a negative outcome and the mock missing person is not found, you can use a staff person that is not working that day and inform staff that the absent staff member will be the designated missing resident. In this case, the event will turn out to be an elopement.
Mock phone calls to 911, primary Dr and contact person will have to be executed as well as an adverse incident report, facility incident report, and resident file documentation.
Go through your facility records and make sure that you are up to date with your elopement drills.
If not, schedule one as soon as possible so that your facility is not issued with a deficiency.
The Regulation states that all staff must participate in at least two drills. If you have a large facility there is a good chance that you will have to conduct more than 2 drills per year to make sure that all staff has participated in 2 drills.