Northwest Healthcare Response Network

This Give Big Tuesday, your support will help keep care running when it’s needed most.  Contributing to the Northwest Healthcare Response Network helps ensure emergency health providers, hospitals and clinics have the tools and resources to save lives in a crisis or disaster.

And in a crisis, experience matters.   For over a decade, our team has been building capabilities and community.  We serve as the backbone for healthcare organizations to address emergent healthcare needs by providing expertise, creating innovative solutions and fostering collaboration across emergency healthcare providers. Your individual contributions can fuel statewide response and collaboration - bringing together public and private hospitals, public-health agencies, and emergency responders to build capabilities, share best practices, and deploy real-time support during disease outbreaks, natural disasters, supply-chain disruptions, and other threats to your community’s health.

Our team is always on, for you by…

• Ensuring statewide readiness. We maintain a common operating picture that guides rapid response across nearly a thousand healthcare partners.
• Fueling innovation. From coordinating healthcare planning for the 2026 FIFA World Cup to alerting hospitals about Baxter IV-solution shortages, we create tools and protocols that save lives.
• Strengthening the healthcare community response. We train non-pediatric and rural facilities to care for children in emergencies—and we’ve led mass casualty coordination and long-term-care evacuations to protect our most vulnerable.

We’ve been protecting your health behind the scenes when disaster strikes.  The Network has been there for you when…

Mass Casualty Incidents: The Network provides leadership and designs programs used as part of mass casualty response plans for jurisdictions across the state, bringing together EMS, hospitals, and first responders to enhance healthcare system preparedness and response to mass casualty events. We focus on planning, training, and centralized coordination to ensure those impacted are supported effectively. An example is the Amtrack derailment in 2017 resulting in over 60 patients. Our team was responsible for working with the hospitals that were receiving patients to ensure those hospitals had been trained to respond, track the patients that were coming to them, and update on patients to support family reunification and accuracy of a traveler manifest to ensure all individuals accounted for and supported. 

FIFA 26 World Cup: The Network is supporting coordination of the healthcare response planning as part of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Our work includes collaboration with Washington state cities and counties to design the foundation to deliver a common operating picture, protocols for healthcare coordination, and convening healthcare to ensure the necessary planning is in place to respond to any patient moving and patient tracking expertise required in the event of a crisis.

Pediatric care: Historically, pediatric healthcare resources in Washington state have been disproportionately concentrated in urban centers like Seattle, leaving suburban and rural areas underserved. Our work includes ensuring balanced access to pediatric care, particularly in emergencies and crisis situations.  Recognizing that children require specialized care, we’ve led initiatives to prepare non-pediatric hospitals and emergency responders with the tools, training, and standardized protocols needed to effectively care for children in emergencies.