Progress for tomorrow: Preparing for the next disaster
ATKINSON: Thank you for the opportunity to be with you. I think every day we think about what we can do to help people have a better life, and that includes their healthcare and just the world around them. And this happens to be an age when we need to think about natural disasters and manmade disasters, and that's just part of the process. And so I think we think about how do we create a system that can take limited resources and try to make smart decisions to use those in a practical way to prepare the best we can for those things that might come about, whether it be an individual with an individual illness or injury or a community or a nation or a world that is faced with a disaster-type situations.
HEALY: Now, remember that was Brian Kelly's question to the first panel. Now, the question is, you said, to create. Are you saying we haven't created it yet?
ATKINSON: I think we're a lot further along than we were. And you know, we live in a – at least as relates to our nation – it's a very sophisticated healthcare system. It's not without flaws, but it is a system that gets better every day. I think events like this where you bring some of the best minds in the world together to talk about lessons learned and those things that are just very human - just those things you need to pay attention to; it helps us get better. Everyone who participates in this will go home with some lessons.
We are not fully prepared to handle the situations, the surge issues in emergency departments, especially in urban areas but certainly extending to some suburban areas and rural areas of the nation; it's a major problem now. And we deal with surge issues daily and we run well over 100 percent census every day in our system. And it's a problem. And it doesn't mean we couldn't handle an emergency, because I assure you we would. But it wouldn't necessarily be as effectively or efficiently done as we'd like it to be, and that's where I think streams of - while we talk about the revenue stream; they do need to be steady and predictable streams of revenue; but it's less about just the concept that we have to spend money, then we have to spend intellectual capital to make this work - and that's sharing ideas and coming up with better ways to do the things that we might not have thought very much about yesterday.
HEALY: Dr. Benjamin.
BENJAMIN: You know what, Dr. Healy, at the end of the day, every individual ought to be able to protect themselves, their families, and their communities from serious preventable health threats. And what keeps me up at night is the fact that we've not done that. We've not engaged the public in a way that makes them prepared. We heard a lot today about the importance of preparedness at the local level, and yet we've really not done the education, giving them the tools, or help them figure out how to do it, and I think that's the next step.
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