Experts are warning hospital leaders at facilities near the Atlantic Ocean to take additional steps this year to ensure hurricane preparations are intact and enhanced, amid what is anticipated to be the worst hurricane season on record.
"The goal of health systems resiliency is to maintain an ability to provide non-interrupted patient care services during a crisis," experts from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and Florida International University in Miami stated, as part of July 16 commentary in The Lancet. "This will increasingly require the need for not only qualified hospital emergency managers in all hospitals, but also clinicians who are trained as disaster medicine specialists."
During the current hurricane season, the U.S. is expecting between 17 and 24 named storms, of which around four to seven are anticipated to become Category 3 or higher in severity.
Hurricane Beryl was the first major storm of the season and landed ashore July 7 in Houston, causing significant damage and forcing hospitals and health systems to rapidly close, reevaluate and respond to changing conditions.
"A hospital's ability to operate when resources are strained, and patient surge is occurring, is an important component of hospital resilience," the authors wrote. "This expertise in crisis healthcare is particularly important now, given the substantially higher number of impactful storms predicted for the 2024 hurricane season and the state of emergency department overcrowding we are now seeing in hospitals across the country that limits surge capacity."
As climate change intensifies the potential impact of these storms, hospital leaders' preparation will also need to change.
Typically, the authors note, hospitals can fall into three main areas of traditional thinking that could hinder their overall preparedness:
- Only focusing on the National Hurricane Center's forecasts limits a view of the storm's possible broader impact zones and hones in on the storm's path, which is important, but it is more important for hospitals to understand the effects that can cause damage beyond the center of the storm.
- Delayed evacuation orders can limit the amount of safe time that can be used to move and protect patients.
- Underestimation of related threats like flooding can also lead to a greater number of fatalities, inadequate preparedness, and slower responses when it comes to a time of need.
"Healthcare leaders should be thinking about implementing innovative ways to keep staff trained and ready by providing high-fidelity simulations, and realistic live exercises," the authors wrote. "An example pertinent to hurricane preparedness would be to simulate operating a hospital for 96 [hours] on diesel generators while at the same time coordinating a response to both a hurricane and cyberattack."