The view from inside major medical centers
Question here, Brian.
KELLY: Anybody else? I just wanted to see if anybody else wanted to take Avery's question, and then we'll go over there, Jim.
MILLER: I was just going to say in the Baltimore-Washington region, the University of Maryland and Medstar with the five hospitals in Baltimore plus Washington Hospital Center and Hopkins work very well together in both exercise planning, and at the time of 9/11, figured out who was going to transport, who was going to receive, what our capacities were in ICUs, and so forth. So we had that all worked out.
SALEM: I would echo that for the Colorado public health, and I think it's well delineated. Obviously, you know what happens when the first casualty comes in. Bets are off in terms of what happens to the public, however.
RUNNING: And also in the Stanford region and the San Francisco Bay Area, we have various hospital councils that are working together. We've formulated a safety officers' task force, if you will, that also meets with EMS and county, civic, city, other providers that work together to allocate the funds that are flowing down from the government agencies and to work together to utilize those funds in the most effective manner for the region, not just for our own institutions. So for example, in our area, we've just created a disaster action planning guide, if you will, that is nicknamed CHERP – comprehensive healthcare emergency response plan. And that guide then is standardized amongst all of the agencies within our county and other hospitals as well to become an actual templated guide that they can each of them take and utilize to formulate a similar disaster plan so that we all know what we are all doing on the same day when any disaster or crisis occurs. So those types of planning processes, training programs, and working with hospital councils and taskforces all flow together to create a more prepared region.
Brian, we have time for just about one more question.
KELLY: One more? Okay, Jim, over by you. You've got someone.
She just answered that question. Is there no one?
KELLY: We've answered all questions? No more anywhere? Okay, one more.
Q: Thank you. Nancy Shute with U.S.News & World Report. What about communicating to the public? Frank, if I'm in Cleveland, how do I know that you're at capacity? How would I know that there is an alternative facility that I might want to go with? Are you addressing that in advance with the public or are you waiting until a disaster happens?
PEACOCK: We actually have an Internet site that you can go to and figure out which hospitals are open and closed, because we have February, where we have problems with occupancy of all hospitals. I'm not sure all cities are set up that way, but you can just – it's a web site. You click on it. It's yellow, green, and red colors that tells you who is closed and who is on bypass and who is not. In a disaster, part of our disaster plan, our emergency partners plan is that the public relations office has to come in and that's their job is to interface with the press and to communicate with the public. The issues are always is the hospital hit, is the tower still up, can we broadcast? But if that's all the case, then yeah.
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