Week 9 Assignment HSA 599
Please respond to the following:
Discuss a life-threatening event or a natural disaster in your community, such as a severe weather event, terrorist attack, or other type of public health emergency.
Examine an overall strategy that medical providers, health care organizations, and public health agencies should include in the response plan that combines the efforts of all groups.
Determine how these groups could work collaboratively to effectively manage this emergency. Provide specific examples to support your rationale from readings throughout your program or from peer-reviewed journal articles.
Disaster Preparedness
The day before September 11, 2001, the cover story of U.S. News and World Report described an emergency care system in critical condition as a result of demand far in excess of its capacity (Shute and Marcus, 2001; see Figure 7-1). While the article focused on the day-to-day problems of diversion and boarding, the events of the following day brought home a frightening realization to many. If we cannot take care of our emergency patients on a normal day, how will we manage a large-scale disaster?
Federal, state, and local government entities have since realized the importance of hospitals, particularly emergency departments (EDs), in planning for such events, and significant progress has been made on integrating inpatient resources into planning for disasters (Schur, 2004). More than 4 years after September 11, however, Hurricane Katrina revealed how far we have to go in this regard.
While Katrina was unusual in its size and scope, the capacity of the emergency care system to respond effectively even to smaller disasters is still in question (GAO, 2003a).
Disaster response involves many different community resources—from police and fire to medical providers, structural and environmental engineers, and transportation and housing experts. The hospital plays a small but crucial role in this larger picture.
It is the epicenter of medical care delivered to those who are injured. Running a hospital is an enormously complex task under the best of circumstances; preparing a hospital for a disaster is infinitely more complicated.
Planning for disasters involves a range of difficult questions: For what types of disaster events should hospitals prepare? Should every hospital prepare for disasters, or should medical response be regionalized?
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2007. Hospital-Based Emergency Care: At the Breaking Point. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/11621.
