Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Appendix H Surge Hospitals:
Providing Safe Care in Emergencies
Executive Summary
AfterHurricaneKatrina slammed into theGulfCoast
in late August 2005 followed closely by Hurricane
Rita, the health care community quickly mobilized
to provide care to thousands of people who were
caught in the storms' paths. Because the hurricanes
and subsequent flooding caused the same sort of
devastation to many local health care facilities as
it did to other types of buildings in the region, the
disaster forcedmany health care organizations to set
up temporary facilities called “surge hospitals” in
places such as shuttered retail stores, athletic arenas,
and veterinary hospitals. The surge hospitals, so-
called because they are designed to treat a surge
in the number of patients needing care, contained
triage, treatment, and sometimes even surgical capa-
bilities. These temporary facilities were established
to serve as a stopgap measure to provide medical
care until the area's health care organizations could
reopen. The severity of the damage that was done
to the region's health care facilities has brought the
health care community's responsibility for planning,
building, and operating effective surge hospitals into
focus. As this disaster has shown, health care orga-
nizations may be forced to provide care at surge
hospitals for an extended period of time due to the
damage sustained to their permanent facilitiesduring
catastrophic events. This reality challenges the Joint
Commission to consider implementing a minimum
set of standards to ensure that care provided at surge
hospitals is safe and of high quality. Should the
development of these standards move forward, the
Joint Commission would seek input from groups
that have extensive knowledge of surge hospitals,
such as the Texas A&M University System Health
Science Center. (Representatives of this organiza-
tion were involved in establishing and operating the
surge hospital described in Case Study 5, which
begins on p. 21.)
It is crucial that health care organizations under-
stand what surge hospitals are and how they can
plan for and establish them, including whom they
should work with to do so. Hurricanes Katrina and
Rita have shown us that having plans to “surge in
place,” meaning expanding a functional facility to
treat a large number of patients after a mass casu-
alty incident, is not always sufficient in disasters
because the health care organization itself may be
too damaged to operate. Where outside of its own
walls does a health care organization go to expand
its surge capacity? Who should be involved in plan-
ning, establishing, and operating surge hospitals?
This paper provides the answers to these questions
and offers real-life examples of how surge hospi-
tals were established on the Gulf Coast.
Introduction
A familiar concept to health care organizations,
surge capacity
is a health care system's ability to
expand quickly beyond normal services to meet
an increased demand for medical care [1].
Surge
hospitals
have been defined as facilities designed
to supplement existing hospitals in the case of an
emergency [2].
Because many health care organizations' ability
to
surge in place
, meaning the capability to expand
the surge capacity of a functioning health care
facility, is limited, health care organizations need
to have plans for increasing surge capacity which
include the establishment of
temporary surge
1
Source: © 2006 by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations
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