| الوصف: |
SUMMARY By the time I walked into the conference call at about 7 a.m. on Tuesday, August 30, HCA's Tulane hospital was surrounded by between four and six feet of water, depending on the side of the building. The water was slowly rising. An estimated 1,300 people were trapped at Tulane Hospital. No CEO has ever had as much reason to be proud of his company as I did during the next few days. We safely evacuated Tulane's patients, staff members, and family members, coordinating more than 200 helicopter sorties to and from Tulane in the process. We transferred every patient to a waiting hospital and took nearly every staff and family member to an HCA-run shelter in Lafayette, Louisiana, where they were bathed, fed, inoculated, given shelter, given access to prepaid cellular phones, and sent where they needed to go. This, I believe, was one of HCA's greatest hours, but we also learned many lessons from the catastrophic event. Although we hope and pray that nothing like this ever happens again, the things we learned can be of use to the healthcare community at large. ON MONDAY EVENING, August 29, 2005, we at HCA's corporate office felt pretty good about the way we had dealt with Hurricane Katrina. That morning, the Category V storm had slammed into the Gulf Coast, threatening more than a half dozen of our hospitals and the communities that they served in Louisiana and southern Mississippi. After the storm cleared, the Garden Park Medical Center in Gulfport appeared to be our hospital in greatest need. The hospital building there had survived intact, but the community surrounding Garden Park had been devastated. Many of our executives spent much of Monday in our hurricane "Command Center," sending extra water, food, fuel, supplies, and security to Garden Park. It was a tough day. But by Monday night, it looked like we had our arms around the problem. The moment I walked into the office Tuesday morning, I could sense that something was very wrong. Several of our executives, including Richard Bracken (president and chief operating officer) and Sam Hazen (head of HCA's western group of hospitals), were in the Command Center, listening to a voice on the speaker phone. At the other end of the line was Mel Lagarde, head of HCA's hospitals in Mississippi and Louisiana (known within the company as the Delta Division). Lagarde, who was calling from the HCA-owned and operated Tulane University Hospital and Clinic, was explaining the problem. Sometime during the night, Lagarde said, water began accumulating in the streets of New Orleans. It had taken hours to figure out what was causing the flood. Apparently a levee, or levees, had failed. By the time I walked into the conference call (about 7 a.m. on Tuesday), the hospital was surrounded by between four and six feet of water, depending on the side of the building. The water was still slowly rising. Because of this, Lagarde and Tulane CEO Jim Montgomery had decided a few hours earlier to start evacuating critical patients by helicopter. The first helicopter was on the way, and it would soon be landing on the top level of the Saratoga Garage, adjacent to the main Tulane Hospital building and connected to it by a bridge on the second floor. The garage had never held a helicopter before. At that time, an estimated 1,300 people were trapped at Tulane Hospital. Of the 121 Tulane patients, 21 were in critical condition. An additional 60 medically fragile people had been sent by the Office of Emergency Management to Tulane from the Superdome the night before the storm hit. Other inhabitants included patient's family members, Tulane staff, family members of Tulane staff, Tulane University Medical School professors and students, and even pets (71 of them, to be exact). They appeared to be safe, for the moment. Lagarde estimated that they had enough food to last maybe two days. After we heard Lagarde's report, we prioritized what needed to be done. … |
