Disaster response in health care (original) (raw)

How Does the Effect of Hurricane Katrina Influence Healthcare Infrastructure and Resilience?

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina brought upon the city of New Orleans, LA one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history. This paper looks at how hospitals were prepared before Katrina, responded to, and grappled with the aftermath of this natural disaster. In the aftermath of Katrina, careful investigation of the healthcare system along with its hospitals, physicians, patients, and residents allow us to take innovative measures and provide guidance to create recommendations to better monitor and care for individuals in the future. Frameworks of resilience theories, studies, and recommendations display how and why disaster planning is essential. The lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina reveal how healthcare infrastructure has changed through numerous interventions in an aim to create a better healthcare system that improves healthcare coverage and emergency preparedness to withstand future disasters, thus creating a better and more resilient healthcare system.

Lessons from Katrina: Response, Recovery and the Public Health Infrastructure

DePaul J. Health Care L., 2006

last visited Sept. 20, 2006) (discussing various facets of health care crisis facing Gulf Coast region after Hurricane Katrina, including closure of Charity and University hospitals); Todd Zwillich, Sens. Back Full Katrina Medical Payments, UPI, Sept. 12, 2005, at http://www.menafn.com/qn\_news\_story.asp?StoryId=CqYt9qeidDxmTA2f0CMLUys 1TzwrPy2fPz (last visited Sept. 20, 2006) (discussing broad impact for public health and health care delivery in Gulf region, post-Katrina and quoting Ray Scheppach, executive director of National Governor's Association: "We've got to go in and almost rebuild and [sic] entire infrastructure, a health infrastructure, in that particular area"); see also Transcript: National Public Radio, Morning Edition, New Orleans' Emergency Rooms Overtaxed, Alix Spiegel, reporting (Jan. 27, 2006) (on file with author) [hereinafter NPR Transcript], available at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5174379 (last visited Sept. 20, 2006) (describing ongoing emergency health care crisis in New Orleans, with many area hospitals disabled by Hurricane Katrina); see also Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, Addressing the Health Care Impact of Hurricane Katrina,

Disaster response in health care: A design extension for enterprise data warehouse

2009

HurricAne KAtrinA mAde lAndfAll and caused catastrophic damage along the coastlines of Alabama, mississippi, and louisiana killing at least 1,836 people. 12 nearly 80% of the city of new Orleans and surrounding areas were ravaged. Katrina is estimated to be responsible for more than $80 billion in damages, making it the costliest hurricane in the u.s. history. 12 Katrina had a major impact on health care in the affected and surrounding areas. thousands of evacuees, including many who had chronic conditions, needed immediate medical care.

Hurricane Katrina: A Deadly Warning Mandating Improvement to the National Response to Disasters

Nova Law Review, 2007

The editors of the Law Review solicited Dr. Marty's contribution to this symposium on disasters, in part because of her expertise in the subject, but also because we wanted to highlight the need for a multidisciplinary approach to disaster preparedness in the hopes of stimulating further collaboration among the professions in this vital area. In this article, Dr. Marty, a medical doctor, puts into context the Federal Response to catastrophes and disasters, explores some of the lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina focusing primarily on the health issues, and then explains some of the remaining policy challenges that continue to face the nation regarding disasters. -Law Review Eds. * Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Battelle Memorial Institute, the Department of Homeland Security, or the Department of Health and Human Services.

Different Medical Needs Between Hurricane and Flood Victims

Wilderness & Environmental Medicine, 2003

Objective.-Through the review of patient records seen by the New Mexico-1 Disaster Medical Assistance Team (NM-1DMAT) after various disasters, we hoped to find patterns that might help in disaster planning. Our hypothesis was that flood and hurricane victims have different medical conditions and needs.

Hurricane Katrina: an American tragedy

Occupational Medicine, 2006

The true extent of the American tragedy that is Hurricane Katrina is still unfolding almost 12 months after the event and its implications may be far more reaching. Hurricane Katrina, which briefly became a Category 5 hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, began as a storm in the western Atlantic. Katrina made landfall on Monday, 29 August 2005 at 6.30 p.m. in Florida as a Category 1 hurricane, turned north, gained strength and made landfall again at 7.10 a.m. in southeast Louisiana as a Category 4 hurricane and rapidly attenuated over land to a Category 3 hurricane. New Orleans is below sea level as a consequence of subsidence and because of elevation of the Mississippi river due to altered flow. The storm brought a nearly 4 m storm surge east of the eye, where the winds blew south to the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain, and gusts of 344 km/h at the storm's peak at 1.00 p.m. Levees protecting the city from adjacent Lake Pontchartrain failed, inundating 80% of the city to a depth of up to 8 m. Further east in the Gulf Coast, a storm surge of 10.4 m was recorded at Bay St Louis, Mississippi [1,2]. What followed was horrifying and discouraging. Poor residents and the immobilized were left stranded in squalor. Essential services failed. Heroic rescues were undertaken with wholly inadequate follow-up and resettlement [3]. Emergency response was feeble. It was only after the military intervened that the situation began, slowly, to improve. New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast to the east is still a depleted, devitalized, largely uninhabitable wreck. Less than a month later, on 24 September, Hurricane Rita followed. A much stronger storm in magnitude, Rita caused further displacement and disruption in Texas, where evacuation measures, undertaken in near-ideal conditions, were shown to be completely inadequate. Floods usually conceal more than they reveal. Hurricane Katrina was an exception. It revealed truths about disaster response in the United States that had been concealed. Now, months later, one may assess the response and recovery to the disaster, evaluate how the country handled the challenge and determine what lessons were, or could have been, learned. Katrina revealed that natural disasters and public health crises are as much threats to national security as intentional assaults. An entire region that played a vital role in the American economy and a unique role in the country's culture ground to a halt. During Katrina and

Emergency Response and Public Health in Hurricane Katrina

Journal of Public Health Management and Practice, 2010

S ince 9/11, federal funds directed toward public health departments for training in disaster preparedness have dramatically increased, resulting in changing expectations of public health workers' roles in emergency response. This article explores the public health emergency responder role through data collected as part of an oral history conducted with the 3 health departments that responded to Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi and Louisiana. The data reveals a significant change in public health emergency response capacity as a result of federal funding. The role is still evolving, and many challenges remain, in particular, a clear articulation of the public health role in emergency response, the integration of the public health and emergency responder cultures, identification of the scope of training needs and strategies to maintain new public health emergency response skills, and closer collaboration with emergency response agencies. KEY WORDS: disaster preparedness training, Hurricane Katrina, natural disaster, oral history, public health emergency response competencies In the early hours of August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall with winds up to 145 m/h in the City of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama causing the death of more than 1800 people, catastrophic destruction to property, and the temporary and permanent displacement of hundreds of thousands of people including the entire New Orleans metropolitan area and surrounding parishes. Within hours, the levees protecting New Orleans breached, flooding the city. Along with the rest of