Pop quiz... When your students arrive on campus, does your university ensure that students have all the information they need, to be taken care of in case of medical or other emergency? Of course it depends on the university, but for most schools, the answer is no!

To examine this question more carefully, let's take a look at two scenarios.

Scenario One

Students sitting in a lecture hall, are critically injured in a hail of sudden gunfire. The shooter is captured, but it takes ten to fifteen minutes for first responders to reach and begin to treat the injured. One student, not as badly injured as the rest, waits his turn. Moments later he realizes he's beginning to lose consciousness, before he's able to tell the paramedics that he is on a special regimen of strong allergy medications.

The university has that information in the student's medical history file at the health clinic, but even though school administrators are trying their best to deal with the crisis, they simply don't have the personnel available right now, to locate and transmit every injured student's emergency contacts and medical information to the hospital. Without that history, the hospital unknowingly gives our injured student a drug that interacts with his allergy medication. He falls into a coma and dies two days later, from medication-related complications.

Scenario Two

One warm spring evening, a group of students are having an impromptu party in a friend's dorm room on another floor. Tornado sirens break the air's stillness and the girls barely have time to grab their cell phones, let alone their belongings, before running to the safety of the storm shelter. When they return, the dorm is leveled and their most cherished and valuable possessions are destroyed.

A week later, the students are stunned to find out that without descriptions, serial numbers or warranty information for their laptops, TVs, cameras and iPods, the chances of getting an insurance company to replace their possessions is slim. And the loss doesn't end there - one girl lost the list of passwords and IDs she needs to complete term papers for school and log in to the computer at work. Another, discovers that all of her ID, membership and credit cards are completely gone. Without those numbers, they'll be difficult, if not impossible to replace.

Those scenarios may be scary, but similar things happen on university campuses every day. In fact, each year in the United States...
# 599,000 college students are injured

# 1,700 college students die from alcohol-related emergencies,

# Over 30,000 students need emergency health care for alcohol overdose

# More than 696,000 college students are assaulted

# More than 97,000 college students are sexually abused

# There are more than 110 million emergency room visits total in the US

# 98,000 people die from medical errors that could have been prevented with a detailed medical history!

When students are living away from home for the first time in their lives, they no longer have mom or dad right there as keeper of the vital information. So when they become injured, or are the victims of a crisis that harms or destroys their property, that information isn't just important, it's critical to recovery.

The first hurdle is figuring out what information is actually necessary for the students to have. The next hurdle is finding a way to make the information secure yet accessible to them (and the hospital that will be treating them) in time of emergency.
Here is the information that hospitals need to have if your students are injured or become ill:

# Three to four current emergency contacts, with multiple contact numbers, email and notes that indicate where contact can be reached on specific days or at certain times.

# Current doctors, dentists and specialists your student visits, like dermatologists and orthodontists

# Current prescriptions, and any past prescriptions that might provide necessary insights into the student's medical background

# Allergies, inoculations and details of any serious illnesses or bad reactions to medication or treatments

Insurance information, policy numbers and agent names
# Basic medical history

# Any details that might influence treatment decisions

# Blood type, identifying marks, or details that might help identify the student in case of mass casualties

# Diseases, major medical procedures performed and any outcome
And for the recovery of personal property or financial emergencies, students need to have:

# Every insurance policy number, member ID and agent contact for anything that affects the student (car, rental, medical, product replacement insurance)

# Credit card numbers, toll free numbers, passwords, credit limits

# Loan numbers, toll free numbers, passwords, terms and payment information

# Important membership numbers and passwords that might become lost or be forgotten and difficult to recover.

# Warranty numbers, serial numbers of expensive equipment like laptops, stereos or televisions.

So how does your emergency contact card or medical history form measure up?
Even if your university does capture all or most of this information, ask yourself what actually happens if a student becomes injured or ill.

# Does the university get in touch with the hospital, or does the hospital get in touch with them?

# If the hospital ends up calling the university, is there a specific place that hospitals need to call, like the registrar, or the health clinic to access a student's emergency information?

# What happens if an emergency occurs after business hours?

# Who is usually responsible for calling the parents or next of kin for an injured student?

The problem is, universities frequently don't have specific written procedures on who needs to do what, when a student becomes ill or injured. We've heard many stories about student's medical histories never arriving at the hospital that is treating them, or parents who aren't notified of their child's severe injuries for hours, or worse days, because the university thought the hospital was notifying them or vice versa.

Problems often occur when information is stored in different departments. Let's say the emergency contact information is stored in the admissions office and the medical history in the health center. This can easily cause a situation where both departments think the other has notified a parent or transmitted a medical history over to a hospital, only to have the hospital end up having to treat the student without a medical history or his specific needs in mind. It's tragic that schools go to the trouble of gathering this vital information only to have it sit unused, when it's needed most. And if this information flow doesn't work effectively when just one student is injured, just think what would happen in a full scale emergency.

Answering these questions honestly and discussing problems that are uncovered, with all of the departments involved, is the first step in designing a student safety system that will ensure maximum efficiency in any emergency, whether it be a student injury or a full blown mass casualty situation.