The Office of the Inspector General released a report on the emergency preparedness and response of the 172 hospitals hardest hit by Superstorm Sandy and found nearly 9 in 10 faced "critical challenges."
Eighty-nine percent of hospitals reported critical challenges, including problems with infrastructure and community collaboration. These problems persisted whether hospitals elected to shelter in place or evacuate, according to the report.
Among infrastructural challenges were electrical and communication failures. Flooding and structural challenges, as well as backup generator failure, created power failures in many hospitals — preventing access to patient medical records, hindering communication within and among hospitals and posing challenges to staff untrained to work in no-power environments.
Hospitals also struggled with community collaboration, including the distribution and sharing of fuel for transportation and generators, having enough hospital and specialty beds for influxes of patients from other institutions and allocating supplies for sheltering members of the public. Staffing also suffered, due to road and public transit closures affecting healthcare professionals' ability to arrive for work to provide care.
For evacuating hospitals, differences in evacuation plans also created problems. While hospitals tended to view patient evacuations as transfers, emergency medical services treated the moves as emergency evacuation, which caused conflicts with protocols. For receiving hospitals, surges in patients — up to 50 percent increases in patient volumes — created specialty bed shortages. While some hospitals were able to discharge patients to create room, this was not possible for all facilities. Patients were received mostly from other hospitals, home care situations, nursing homes and specialty clinics, though mental health clinics, community shelters and displaced community members also contributed to increased volumes.
Most of the hospitals analyzed had been cited for emergency response deficiencies in the three years prior to Sandy. Common deficiencies included failure to routinely test generators, inaccurate emergency drills, problems with fire safety equipment, obstruction of hospital exits or exit routes and misleading or missing hospital signage. These compliance issues were often responsible for the deficiencies during the storm, according to a report from CBS New York.
Almost all tri-state hospitals made changes to their emergency plans as a result of Superstorm Sandy's effects, according to the OIG report.
More articles on capacity management:
21 statistics on the outpatient utilization shift