South Florida Hospitals on Call to Take Gulf Coast Patients
Sep. 1–Responding to a request for help from federal health officials, South Florida hospitals are on call to take patients from the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast and also could begin sending hospital staff to the devastated region.
Florida Agency for Health Care Administration Secretary Alan Levine said Wednesday that federal officials have implemented a national system that allows patients to be transferred from disaster areas to hospitals in safe states. Both Miami and Tampa hospitals are a part of that National Disaster Medical System and could receive patients from the Gulf Coast after 24 to 48 hours’ notice, he said.
“It’s the first time we’ve used it as far as I know,” Levine said of the interstate transfer system. “We could get zero patients. We could get 100.”
Levine said his agency would help the federal government coordinate patient transfers to Florida. Miami and Tampa are among 22 cities nationwide that are a part of the nationwide disaster medical system, he said. He didn’t know which hospitals in those cities were part of the disaster system, which is a section of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Florida and other states around the nation received the request for help Wednesday during a conference call that Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt hosted. The call included hospitals and health-care organizations around the country. Leavitt asked for their help in caring for the sick and injured on the Gulf Coast.
Federal officials asked them to assemble teams of hospital workers to travel to the Gulf Coast and work in a series of field hospitals the federal government is opening there.
Federal health officials said they plan to set up 10 field hospitals with 250 beds each by Friday outside the affected areas in Louisiana and Mississippi, said Linda Quick, president of the South Florida Hospital and Health Care Association. Levine said federal officials planned to open 40 field hospitals in the next week and a half.
“They indicated they had a lot of federal government people who offered to help, but they were hoping some of the country’s hospitals would put together teams to staff these medical shelters,” Quick said.
HCA Inc. spokeswoman Lourdes Garrido, who participated in the conference call, said HCA hospitals will participate in the effort. No specific plans have been made yet.
HCA, which has five hospitals in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast, also has several hospitals on the Gulf Coast, including Tulane University Hospital & Clinic in New Orleans and Lakeside Hospital in Metairie, La., both of which were evacuated Wednesday. The company also owns Garden Park Medical Center in Gulfport, Miss., which is operating on generators with no plans to evacuate.
A reporter’s call to the Department of Health and Human Services wasn’t returned immediately Wednesday.
Quick said the federal officials indicated the field hospitals would be used to triage patients. Patients who need hospital care would be transferred.
“Their other request was for identification of up to 2,500 hospital beds that can take some of these people,” Quick said of the federal officials on the conference call.
Levine said his office would work with the federal government and the Florida hospitals to handle patient transfers from the Gulf Coast.
He also said his office, the Florida Department of Health and the Florida Emergency Operations Center would work with the state’s hospitals to help them send teams of doctors and nurses to work in the field hospitals.
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