Units could prove crucial in disaster
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By MIMI HALL
USA TODAY
The government is dangerously behind on plans to build mobile field hospitals that could be needed to treat thousands of sick and dying victims of a terrorist attack or natural disaster, according to doctors in the government’s medical response program, former top disaster officials and some members of Congress.
The Homeland Security Department, which runs the nation’s disaster-response system, “by and large has not been serious about the medical issues,” said Jerome Hauer, former head of the federal Office of Public Health Preparedness. “They don’t get the notion that during a disaster one of the fundamental needs is taking care of the large number of patients.”
One example is Homeland Security’s failure to complete a prototype of a 250-bed field hospital.
The Bush administration is preparing to unveil a flu pandemic plan, but 4 1/2 years after 9/11 and anthrax attacks prompted warnings of bioterrorism and eight months after Hurricane Katrina wiped out New Orleans hospitals, the government still has not set standards for what mobile hospitals should stock or how they should operate.
Jake Jacoby, head of a San Diego medical response team, said Homeland Security is too focused on “ice and duct tape.”
Although $20 million was set aside for the project in fiscal 2005 under the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is part of Homeland Security, Congress cut off funding in fiscal 2006 before it was done. The program foundered despite “broad consensus that (mobile hospitals) are needed for our federal medical response,” said Jeffrey Lowell, who served as chief medical adviser to former Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge. To develop a prototype and standards, “we’re talking chump change in terms of federal dollars.”
Bennet Waters of Homeland Security’s medical office said the department “recognizes the need for these capabilities” and will request more money from Congress to complete the prototype and standards.
Unlike mobile hospitals set up by the Defense Department, which are mostly geared toward treating troops with combat wounds, a disaster-response hospital would be equipped to treat babies, the elderly and everyone in between. Lew Stringer, the doctor developing the prototype at FEMA, told a conference last year that the hospitals would be set up for surgery as well as diagnostic tests and treatments.
Some lawmakers say the stalled program should continue. “There is a need for capabilities like mobile field hospitals, especially during deliberate, accidental or natural disasters,” said Laura Caudell, spokeswoman for Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., head of a subcommittee on health preparedness.
Such hospitals could have been used when New Orleans flooded and thousands needed treatment.