The view from inside major medical centers
I think the other thing is that we need to recognize that at least in the initial phases of any event, we are really talking about pretty basic medical kinds of services. And so you really need a partnership between academic centers like ours that have unique expertise but you also need the community connection. I think a lot of the success initially in Houston during the hurricane events was based on the county medical society mobilizing local doctors and nurses and other professional people to the areas that we needed those resources. And so that also helps to spread in ways of cost, but also volunteer efforts and other things into the community.
There are none of us that can afford to absorb the kinds of costs that would be required to – as an institution or a group of institutions meet the needs.
KELLY: Vicki, do you have a thought on that?
RUNNING: Well, again, I think it goes back to partnerships with community and other medical providers within the region that you're in, as well as reaching out to the broader base of the nation. As we saw with Katrina, we were able to mobilize a volunteer force very quickly to respond within a week or to and go down to that region to assist in some of the MASH-type care that was being conducted there. But what we found was that there was a period of chaos and a period of uncertainty, and I believe that our planning efforts right now need to be focused on reducing that amount of time so that we can mobilize more quickly. And that starts at the grassroots level.
If our organizations are prepared and our staff knows what to do, then that has a ripple effect and goes out into the community. As we know, medical centers are magnets for people when either they are frightened or they are uncertain or they are hurt or their family members are injured, and we can't forget that during any crisis, we also have normal medical care that has to continue. Not only would we have people injured, for example, in a pandemic by the flu, but we would have injury by people, who were not able to get their medications. We might have other injuries from a situation where some child falls down, someone gets hurt because they are not supervised as well as they might be when family members are ill. We have pediatric needs that are very different from adult needs in any type of pandemic situation or any normal disease. So those are issues that I think we have to begin to deal with very carefully in our own organizations before we can go out and assist the larger community as a whole.
KELLY: Yeah, Michael.
SALEM: I would just add two things. First of all, I do think that relative to partnerships, the partnerships with the military, whether it be first responders and civilian support groups I think is one where a lot of effort is being made, and I think at least in our area is going well. And then just to extend my colleague's point, what if we – you know, our efforts relative to this pandemic are being made to keep the spike of the pandemic curve that the secretary talked about from being as high. Once you flatten that curve out – and we will potentially be successful there, that is when the issues of health insurance and care over time where you will have an enormous number of folks still in the system, and then what do you do after that. That has to be looked at as well.
advertisement
