Reliable Hospital Emergency Communication During Terrorist Attacks

Industry: Healthcare
Use case: Emergency Communication
Location: Belgium
Employees: 2,000

Works when other channels are down

Reliable communication channel

Instantly deliver information to staff

Company overview

CHU Saint-Pierre is a university hospital in Brussels, Belgium.

Summary

When a terrorist attack disrupted communication channels at CHU Saint-Pierre hospital, they turned to DeskAlerts to keep staff informed and safe. With phone networks down, DeskAlerts helped deliver urgent updates instantly, ensuring smooth coordination and patient safety during the crisis.

Now, the hospital uses DeskAlerts daily to share critical information across departments quickly and reliably, even when other systems fail.

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Challenge

Searching for a Crisis Communication Channel

With thousands of employees, CHU Saint-Pierre hospital sought a solution to deliver urgent information to all or certain staff members daily and in emergencies. The hospital wanted to have a backup crisis communication channel that would keep working when other channels were offline.

Solution

A Reliable Hospital Emergency Alert System That Works When Others Fail

CHU Saint-Pierre chose DeskAlerts as an emergency communication system to supplement their primary email and phone notification channels.

March 22, 2016, happened to be a day of several terrorist attacks in Belgium, requiring hospitals to operate in a state of emergency. With DeskAlerts already deployed and used across the building, CHU Saint-Pierre was well-prepared for such a scenario.

The hospital used the system during a terrorist attack to organize its operations when the usual communication channels were overloaded and inaccessible.

Shortly after the explosion, the hospital was in an alert state, and the internal phone network became overloaded.

We used DeskAlerts to lower the number of internal calls. When the external phone network went down, we used DeskAlerts to tell employees to switch to SMS messaging. After the bomb alerts occurred again, we used DeskAlerts to let employees know about police with sniffer dogs operating in our units.

Without DeskAlerts, this day would have been much harder to manage.

Geoffrey Collet

Application Administrative

Result

Hospital Communication During Crisis and Daily: How the Alerting System is Used

During the terrorist attack, CHU Saint-Pierre already had DeskAlerts in place. It benefited from a reliable communications channel, which proved to be essential during the state of emergency.

When phone communications were down, having a secondary messaging channel helped keep patients and medical staff safe.

The hospital management could handle the situation effectively. With DeskAlerts, they could quickly send vital notifications to targeted staff.

As a result, hospital staff were kept informed in a timely manner as the emergency unfolded, and patients were not affected.

Here’s what CHU Saint-Pierre representatives said about that day:

On a daily basis, the hospital uses DeskAlerts to notify staff about technical issues and other problems. They also use it when they need a fast and reliable channel to communicate with the emergency department, the operating center, the intensive care unit, the pharmacy, or even the catering services.