An immediate evacuation of Knoxville Hospital and Clinics was ordered on Wednesday morning…but if you were there, you never would have known it.

Hospital personnel conducted an evacuation drill to test their readiness to deal with a real-life situation; this was strictly a tabletop exercise — no patients or staff were physically moved, and no extra emergency vehicles responded to the scene.

Katrina Nelson from Knoxville Hospital and Clinics tells KNIA/KRLS News these exercises are used to train personnel at all levels on what to do in such an emergency.

“Luckily we don’t have tragedies and emergencies that happen on a regular basis; but it’s nice to have these exercises to pull our incident command together and kind of walk through the steps of what would happen if we really did have an emergency that presented here at the hospital,” Nelson says.

The exercise mainly involved contacting other facilities to find out how many beds they had available and how many patients they could take; hospital staff also contacted ambulance companies and first responders about emergency transportation.

A debriefing after the exercise will examine what went right, and more importantly find out what went wrong; this will enable the staff to fix any procedural problems in advance of a true emergency.