Mike Hoffman and Tiffany Pybus: Fire Safety is All About Community

(Access show transcript) Mike Hoffman and Tiffany Pybus from Covenant Health in Alberta share how they put the HIROC Cultivate Safety Grant into action by implementing a wildland fire suppression system at the Banff Mineral Springs Hospital.

Summary

On our second episode of Share Scale Repeat, we’re taking a closer look at the impact of the HIROC Safety Grants Program, and the dedication of our Subscribers who transform their grants into action. Covenant Health’s Mike Hoffman, Fire Safety Consultant, and Tiffany Pybus, Corporate Service Manager, Integrated Services, tell us about their wildland fire suppression system at the Banff Mineral Springs Hospital.

As wildland fires continue to be top of mind for Canadians, so too is the preservation of critical infrastructure within communities. Hospitals play an immense role in not only the re-entry plan after an evacuation, but in representing a sense of community and resilience. With this key knowledge, the team at Covenant Health was motivated to use their HIROC Cultivate Safety Grant towards ensuring the Banff Mineral Springs Hospital is protected and their community remains strong.

Mike and Tiffany give us a deep dive on overcoming the hurdles with being the first healthcare facility in Alberta to implement this system, the importance of proactive wildfire management, and tips for HIROC Subscribers on creating a strong grant application.

Mentioned in this Episode

• Covenant Health
• HIROC Safety Grants Program
• Banff Mineral Spring Hospital
• Town of Banff
• Wholesale Fire & Rescue

Transcript 

Even the smallest idea can spark big change. At HIROC, we see it every day with organizations across Canada finding new ways to create the safest healthcare system. On Share Scale Repeat we talk through some complex topics in healthcare, interviewing the brains behind the projects that are keeping Canadians safe. We're doing this so you can find ways to scale the information where you work because safety can't happen in silos.

Philip: Hey everyone, it's Philip from HIROC here. You probably heard my voice on our podcast Health Care Changemakers, but did you know we have another podcast called Share Scale Repeat? My colleagues, Trevor and Abi, who are joining me right now are the hosts of that show, and we're so fortunate today to have Tiffany and Mike with us who will be sharing a story about their grant that HIROC was able to give them through the HIROC Safety Grants. So I'm going to pass it over to Trevor and Abi.

Welcome.

Trevor Hall: Thanks so much, Philip for being here and thanks to Abi, Mike and Tiffany for all the great conversations. And most importantly, thanks to you all. Thanks to our listeners, thanks for being our front line in safety and for being our front line in life safety and property prevention.

I'm Trevor Hall. I'm your Vice President of Healthcare Safety and Risk Management and so happy to be here with Abi. I think perhaps the best thing to do, Abi, if you agree, Mike and Tiffany, I was wondering if you may be able to first introduce yourselves and then perhaps tell us about a time what the wildland fire suppression system at Banff Mineral Springs Hospital is, and how it helps.

Mike Hoffman: Tiffany, go ahead.

Tiffany Pybus: I'll introduce myself, but then I'll let Mike introduce himself and then tell you about the system because he has way more knowledge about the system. I know about the grant writing part, but he definitely did all the work on the system part. So my name's Tiffany Pybus. I'm a corporate service manager for integrated services at Covenant Health here in Alberta.

Mike Hoffman: Good, thanks Tiffany. My name's Mike Hoffman. I'm the Fire Safety Consultant for Covenant Health and I'm in charge of doing a lot of pre-planning for all of our sites. But most importantly, we do want to thank HIROC for the grant that we did receive for this wildland fire suppression system. I like to think of this system as more of a large watering system for your lawn. Really, it's a superimposed type watering system. It consists of 1500 feet of two and a half inch hose, 150 feet of inch and a half hose. We have a total of 14 ground sprinklers, or what we call quad sprinklers that are about three feet high. The sprinklers themselves once pressurized will shoot 360 degrees, approximately 40 to 45 meters in distance giving a good ground coverage of our site.

Once we deploy the system, get it all set up, deploy it, we're ready within two hours. So it's quite exciting when we do see it. With these quad sprinklers, what we had to do on the roof, we had to secure them to 4X4, or sorry, 6X6 posts onto the roof because we do have air medical helicopters that do fly in and out of the Banff Mineral Springs Hospital. We wanted to ensure that these sprinklers were maintained on the roof at all times. So we ended up doing that with the facility maintenance and the engineering team, which helped out greatly in getting this set up. But once we did set it up within 15 to 20 minutes, we were able to saturate the entire ground and the roof of the structure in itself. Which helps in bringing this humidity, relative humidity down, it cools it off, which prevents the likelihood of a fire getting caught within the area.

The reason we ended up putting them on top of the roof is some of our facilities have asphalt and rock mixture. And with the asphalt you can have embers that can travel at least 20, we call it 20 kilometers from a natural fire, and it can be carried right to the building itself. So by saturating the roof and saturating the surrounding areas on the ground, the chance of fire lessens significantly for the building. So it does prevent the rush of grass fires nearing the building, any embers that are going to be going onto the building itself. That's really it in a nutshell.

Trevor Hall: Yeah, I think you're very modest, Mike and Tiffany, I think. Again, thanks for being our frontline. This is just such a historically important where last year you and all of our frontline receivers and responders had to step up in a historically important time where wildland fires became an important piece of history, but also the future of how do we respond. I can't thank you enough for setting the context of the wildland fire suppression system and really want to hear more about the experiences from Banff Mineral Springs Hospital, and again how as a healthcare system, we can learn.

I'm wondering if either of you may be able to speak a bit about how this really critical new system makes an impact on patient and community safety.

Tiffany Pybus: I'll start with that and then I'll probably pass over to Mike. So when a community is evacuated, critical infrastructure preservation is such a key element of that community coming back as a reentry plan. So a healthcare facility is one of those key elements, so preservation there is essential. Having that facility being able to be early into the re-entry plan means that those community members are able to come home sooner. Mineral Springs is actually home to 25 continuing care residents. This is their forever home, so it means they get to come home. So that's a pretty emotional thing for all of those individuals. It actually, if you think about someone being able to come home after a fire, after they've been removed for, we actually don't even have a time of how long they've been removed for, that's not just safety, that's so emotional for them.

It is not just their emotional and physical safety, it's so psychological, which is how we got down the path of this grant was actually building it on resilience and community resilience that is so long-standing after a wildfire. And one of the big pieces that we then built on with the community was that a lot of our rural communities actually have systems like this in place, but they can be used in their preservations of other critical infrastructures. So now that Banff Mineral Springs has their own system, the town of Banff actually can use their system to preserve something else. So it shows that we're engaged as a community partner. So while we're preserving the healthcare facility, something like the school or the water treatment plant can be saved instead.

So research is showing us that the decrease in burnout on staff as well, because all of those residents and patients who are being transferred out of those healthcare facilities, they're going somewhere else. So we're seeing that in other urban centers. So Banff is a perfect example where they're maybe transferred to Canmore or Calgary, or as far away as Fort McMurray. So we're then seeing the burnout on other frontline staff. So when we are able to re-enter sooner back into the communities, we actually then can see an alleviation of the burnout in other rural communities as well.

Mike, do you have anything to add?

Mike Hoffman: You've answered quite well there, Tiffany. One other thing that I just like to add with it, within this critical infrastructure, you think of a hospital within a community, if you lose that hospital, you will probably likely lose that community as well. Because the people that are living there want to have a hospital that they can go to in the case of an emergency. So this played a very critical role. We learned a lot from the Jasper wildfires previously one year ago. The devastation that it did within that area. Yes, the hospital was saved. They had some sprinkler systems supplied by the town of Jasper, which they used.

So we took that step forward a little bit more thinking, you know what, we've got to be prepared, be more proactive rather than reactive, and by getting this set up for the site was a huge, huge difference for us. I believe it really put the mind at ease to the 25 continuing care residents knowing that they're going to be safe. And as Tiffany mentioned, yes, they can travel up to Fort McMurray, which is going to be five, six hours away from Banff and itself. So they're displaced for a long time, no family, no friends, and it takes an emotional toll, a mental emotional toll on these residents as well.

So it's giving them a better peace of mind within the community. And yeah, the town of Banff, the Banff Fire Department, it's making their job that much easier. They know that we've taken care of things, they can go and protect other infrastructure.

Trevor Hall: Yeah, wow. The impact not only to the healthcare system but to individuals I think is just palpable. And again, congratulations and thanks for this. I think absolutely as wildland fires become an ever-present concern and opportunities to learn from, I think how can we take what happened in a bit of the north of Alberta, but also as it moves forward down. I think a lot of conversations around within the territories in the east, it shows that it's just not one province or territory. This is how we can all learn and share together.

I love what you were both saying around resilience and adaptiveness and the impact to patients and families and overall support networks. I think having to think about ever decanting a hospital is just something that we never want to live and we've had to actually do that, right? And I think if you're able to take the learnings throughout and build that into localized areas such as Banff, which also is a very heavily tourist area, and now how do we make sure that we're not only there for those that live and inhabit the beautiful lands, but also those who want to visit from around the world. So just huge congratulations.

I think from a learning perspective, I'd love to hear your thoughts. What learnings came about from being the first healthcare facility in Alberta to implement such a system? And I don't know, how did you get through these learnings?

Mike Hoffman: A lot of it was trial by fire.

Trevor Hall: No pun intended.

Mike Hoffman: Yeah, no pun intended. Exactly. Realistically, when our leadership team had approached us and asked start thinking outside the box and what we can do to prepare for any of our sites realistically, but looking at Banff being the real largest site that has a huge impact. It was by trial and error. It really was. Because we didn't know what we were getting ourselves into. Initially I started phoning some of my vendors that I've dealt with in the past when I was in the fire service for 35 years, and we kind of put our heads together figuring out what we could do, how we could design things, things like that. And it was step-by-step, with the one supplier that we had been working with all the way through.

When we actually activated the system for the very first time when we got together, the vendor and myself, to look at the site, it was still winter time and that was in January of this year. And really putting things together as how we were going to do, what we're going to play with, what kind of hose do we actually need. I know the day that we brought the equipment out, which we thought we had enough equipment, and as it turned out, no, we didn't have enough. So we had family members from Wholesale Fire who, it's a family-owned and operated business. They had their family members bringing extra supplies out to us. And we spent just over 12 hours setting it up, working different angles, figuring out what we need to do.

We started out with just inch and a half hose line being supplied to the top of the roof for the five sprinklers. By the time we hooked the fifth sprinkler up, it was just like dribbles of water were only coming out. There were no longer high pressure. So we kind of put our heads together and came up that we needed more volume. So in order to get more volume, we needed two and a half inch hose. This is where we came up with the 1500 feet that we required to use for the site. And we were able to supply it from the hydrants that were on our property, so we're not getting water.

One of our lessons learned actually out of this is that we are on federal property, and on federal property there's rules and regulations which you have to follow. And one of the rules and regulations I was quite surprised was we have the Bow River going right behind, probably about 500 feet from the hospital, and you can't just take water out of the Bow River to put onto your fire in your backyard. So that was one of the biggest lessons that we had learned out of it. But once we got everything set up from the hydrants to feeding the main supply up to the roof, to surrounding the whole entire building, we hit the jackpot.

It was a long 12-hour day in getting things set up, but we could see the results from what we had right at that time. So we are very proud of it, of what we were able to accomplish in that timeframe.

Trevor Hall: Absolutely, and you should be proud of us and congrats. Thank you for your 35 years of firefighting services. I think some of that tactical experiences though is like, it's like in healthcare it's human centric, it's tactile in nature. Meaning that the backpacks we have of experiences when we leave the system, it leaves with us. And I think having you there at the right time with your teams really allows us to learn. I love this idea always when I was in fire service too, is that you don't want to learn about a fire in a fire. And I think this is exactly what you were doing is the trialing and the testing of the usability of the systems. Partnership, who knew the Bow River is no go, right? You have to make sure that you're going and how do you make sure you're doing it well?

I love the fact that I know listeners will absolutely want to connect with you both and your teams around other practical considerations of how do you do this? How do you start thinking about it? You started thinking about it in January, you tested and you implemented it. And making sure even the technical pieces of flow to ensure that you do have the water pressure that you need is just absolutely critical. Again, we want to have that ready when we need it, and we know that we will have a good chance of wanting to make sure that we have it ready when we do need it.

Now, my last question before turning it over to Abi, who's our superstar and the brains of all of this, is really why is it so important for healthcare facilities located in at-risk areas to have a key eye on proactive wildfire management?

Mike Hoffman: Oh boy. Coming from the fire industry in itself, I've always been more proactive look and approach. And we have become so laissez-faire over the years of just, you know what, it's not going to happen to us. It's not going to happen in our backyard. But we're seeing with climate change more and more and more the effects that it is having, not only within our province, but as you had mentioned earlier, Trevor too, across our country, we're seeing more devastation. But just being prepared, looking at the site in itself, focusing on what they call the fire smart perspective, cleaning up the dead brush, the dead fall. Making sure a lot of the trees and grass are well trimmed and taken care of, not having wood chips next to your building, things of that nature.

Because it can happen very quickly. And as we noticed within Jasper, it was a matter of hours it happened. We had the good fortune of having one consultant that was provided by Banff Fire. He's a wildland, I like to call him a wildland expert, Stewart Walkinshaw. And he was giving us a lot of great information that with a lot of these wildland fires, typically a community will look at it a three-day approach. Being that, okay, three days away we know we've got a fire. Two days we're going to be starting everybody to be on alert. We're going to start potentially evacuating the area. Then day one where it's just the day that everything is gone, that's when we're going to start up our sprinkler system within.

So having that preparedness, that understanding is great, but just looking at what you can do previous to any of this happening, and you don't have to be in a wooded area to be concerned. You can have wildland grass fires be a threat to your communities as well. So making sure that it's clean, understanding the different structures, you could have a asphalt, shingled roof as opposed to a rock or as opposed to a sloped roof that has not fireproof shingles, but lessen the chance of doing harm with them. Because a lot of our facilities right now have what they call a parapet. It's a false angled roof with an opening in the middle of this roof.

So that's where a lot of your damage can be done. I know when I do my fire threat assessments with their sites every spring, that's one of the things I look at is the roof. Is it clean? You can have dead fall of leaves, tree sap, things, whatever the case is, those can go up very, very quick from one simple little spark. So pre-planning, getting things prepared all the way through.

Trevor Hall: Yeah, I love that. Again, it goes back to this whole concept of preparedness and adaptive and resilience. We see it at a higher risk, we know that wildland fires are happening earlier and they're staying longer. They're also having impacts. A lot of work has been done within the Northwest Territories as well as looking at, hey, how do you prepare people to have these conversations of staying to respond to wildland fire? Or how do you decant a hospital? Or how do you repopulate a hospital? And what do you do with surge? And I think these are all wonderful conversations that we can all learn as Canadians across the country, stronger together.

Again, this is really, really powerful impact to safety and to risk and overall to sharing across the system. And I think I'll pass it over to Abi to not only introduce herself, but to also take the next questions around learnings of the [inaudible 00:19:49].

Abi Sivakumar: Yeah, great to meet you, Mike and Tiffany. I'll be shifting topics just a bit. Can you speak to the importance of supporting innovative safety solutions at healthcare organizations, especially after the implementation of your own project?

Tiffany Pybus: I think like with innovation in healthcare, that's essentially how healthcare survives. That's whether it's medicine in healthcare, or something as a really big set of sprinklers, this is how healthcare is surviving. Implementation-wise, Mike spoke to it really well. It's trial and error. It's the willingness to try something new and to take a bit of risk, and it might fail, but it's the preservation and perseverance of like, we're just going to keep going and we're going to make little adjustment after little adjustment. Knowing that you're doing it for the right reason and that there's a goal at the end to keep going, that it's for these communities that need it. It's for the patients and residents that we're here to serve and support, and that it's using evidence-based research.

It's using learnings from the past fires that we had. It's using research from the Jasper fire, the Fort McMurray fire, and it's adapting to meet the uniqueness of healthcare. So it's taking this really unique experience that we are so fortunate here at Covenant Health to have in Mike, that a lot of other organizations don't have. And I think Mike has downplayed all of his knowledge and mitigation that he did, that we would not have been able to get through without him. But taking all of that, and you have to keep going because you know it's for the right reason. So every time you hit one of those hurdles, it's another mitigation strategy. And that you just have to keep thinking of the next thing and making a pivot plan.

Abi Sivakumar: I love your points around just keep going and pushing through despite the pivots. And speaking of innovative safety solutions with applications for HIROC's Cultivate Grant now open, what advice would you give to others on creating a strong application? Is there a specific strategy, approach, or framework which guided your application?

Tiffany Pybus: I think for our application, we focused heavily on collaboration between different groups. So we were looking at using different groups that were bringing different perspectives. So we were using a literature review that was bringing information about resiliency and that psychological perspective and that rural community partnership that Covenant Health speaks to as one of our strategic values and our strategic priorities. But then we were talking with Mike and one of his huge pieces of his role of going to do the fire safety inspections, and what his experience in 35 years of the fire industry. And trying to piece those things together of what's working, what's not working in the industries, and how are we doing something a little bit different?

And then laying it out in obtainable timelines, obtainable smart goals. And then fire right now is the season's getting longer, it's starting earlier, it's running later. It's burning more hectares than ever before. We're displacing more people. So in that respect for us, that kind of set some of our timelines because we knew we needed to act faster. So we were able to work from when the previous seasons had started. So I think when you have a timeline, and I think that would be my recommendation for people that are starting that grant process, when you have a timeline that you want to achieve, work backwards from that and set some realistic goals. Kind of build those into your project plan.

And that was something that Mike and I worked together on of who we needed to engage in. Our grant actually involved a lot of community engagement. Whether that was with the Banff Mineral Springs Hospital or Banff Fire or the town of Banff. And the ton of work that Mike did with Wholesale Fire and Rescue, the vendor. We needed a ton of time to allow those relationships to continue to foster. A lot of them Mike already had started, but we needed to get them on board. We're going to be the first in Alberta to do this, so we need you to get on. We need your support that we're going to do something a little bit different here. But I think working backwards in those timelines and having some really attainable deadlines that you can hold yourself accountable to.

Mike Hoffman: And just adding to that too, sorry Abi, with Wholesale Fire and Rescue, they did wildland fire suppression, but it was more for the forestry, more for fire departments. There was nothing really designed for buildings that you could buy sprinklers that would work effectively. They do have what they call as a WASP, W-A-S-P, which is just essentially you hook up to a garden hose, put it on your gutter and let it go. It provides some security for sure. But these quad sprinklers that we have for the system were specifically designed by this company of Wholesale Fire. They went out and they thought, you know what? This is a different world that we have to really look at.

And when Scott from Wholesale and I got together, we started to talk, and his father-in-law started to think of what they can design that's going to be effective for it. And yeah, we had the stakeholders all on board. And fortunately enough, it's worked out very, very well for all of us.

Abi Sivakumar: Yeah, that's great advice around working backwards with strict timelines and leaving enough time to establish those partnerships. I'm sure our subscribers for working very hard on their application [inaudible 00:25:54] what you said is so helpful. So thank you for that. And besides HIROC, were there any organizations who helped bring this initiative to life? If so, who were they and what role did they play?

Tiffany Pybus: I think-

Mike Hoffman: Go ahead.

Tiffany Pybus: Yeah, I think Mike's spoken a lot about Wholesale Fire and Rescue. So they were a fantastic team. They came out and were with us from January, right through. This really wouldn't have been possible with them. They were used to working with fire teams and we were working with facilities maintenance and engineering staff who had no fire experience and were talking about sprinklers and hoses. So they were really, really great to work with. They were local to Calgary, and so it's not that far of a drive out to Banff, and who doesn't love to come out to Banff on a nice sunny day, you're setting up sprinklers. So they were fantastic to work with and gave us a ton of information and really hands on with us.

The town of Banff and Banff Fire, they were incredibly supportive of this initiative. They were informative. They were supplying the wildfire consultant to assist in advising us of all of these pieces of information about different types of fire and different things for us to be aware of as we were implementing our own system. And a piece of that not only were one of our stakeholders, but they were one of our collaborators in it. And they had such a buy-in because by having Banff Mineral Springs have their own system, they were able to take the system that the town had and use it to preserve one of their own, or another piece of critical infrastructure. So a ton of buy-in there.

But when the town has been evacuated, there's still first responders who are coming around to check to make sure those sprinklers are still working. So we need them to be right there with us and be our partners there. So Town of Banff and Banff Fire were incredible throughout this whole piece. Banff Mineral Springs Hospital for being the first site to trial this is so supportive with this new challenge and their facilities maintenance and engineering for taking on this new learning. Because they were learning something that was completely out of their wheelhouse. They took on the behind the scenes. Mike gave them a map of, okay, this is where these sprinklers are going to be laid out. They took on the challenge and they definitely rose to the occasion.

And I think lastly, I think we have to thank our organization, Covenant Health. Our leadership team has been fantastic in seeing the value of this mitigation and innovation, taking some really big sprinklers and understanding the uniqueness of it. The concept of some really big sprinklers, verse the potential of losing critical infrastructure and what that could potentially mean of trying to rebuild a hospital, especially rebuilding a hospital on national park grounds. But our leadership team was really supportive of the number of hours and the number of people that we needed to bring in, and the community engagement we needed. But also supportive that we support our community partners and those relationships and how important that is to us.

So we had their encouragement throughout this. And then when we actually got the system sorted, and Mike has done all of his work and had all of the write up and everything done, we had their support and how do we share this? Because I think that was our next step, and when Mike and I have taken it that next step further of, okay, we have this and we want to upscale it within our own organization, but I think it's a disservice for us not to share this. Because we've learned something new, but wildfire and climate change is happening in Canada. We need to share this information because if we can help others, I think there is that sharing is caring kind of concept here. And $20,000 in healthcare, if we can share that piece that we've learned, and we've had that support from Covenant Health. So they have been fantastic throughout this.

Mike Hoffman: Yeah, we don't want to keep it all into that little box, hold it close to our heart and say, we've done it, no one else is going to do it. That's not us. We want to collaborate and spread the word on this because it can be so effective in any community, any community at all, and especially those that have healthcare centers. You don't want to lose that center within your town because you're going to lose the town.

Abi Sivakumar: That's amazing and a huge shout-out to everyone you mentioned. It sounds like everyone had a different role from supporting this new thing to learning about this new thing, but they all made a huge impact.

Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Mike and Tiffany, and telling us about your amazing initiative. It's always so wonderful to hear about subscriber stories and the impact of our safety grant. So thank you so much again.

Mike Hoffman: Thank you for having us.

Tiffany Pybus: Thank you.

Thanks for listening. For more interviews, be sure to follow our show wherever you get your podcasts. If you like what you hear, please rate and review the show. If healthcare innovation is your thing, check out HIROC's award-winning leadership podcast, Healthcare Changemakers. And don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn to see the latest news in risks, safety, insurance, and more. Share Scale Repeat is recorded by HIROC's Communications and Marketing team and produced by Podfly Productions. Have a question? Email us at [email protected]. Until next time.