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WASHINGTON — Glitches in evacuating thousands of people from nursing homes and hospitals remained a headache during Hurricane Gustav.
Although better than three years ago when Hurricane Katrina struck, Louisiana health-care leaders said there’s still room for improvement.
While communications systems have improved greatly, local hospital executives said they will work on their ability to contact physicians and staff when computers, phones and other devices are inoperable.
Transportation and communications problems were rampant with Hurricane Katrina three years ago from the federal to the state and local levels.
“The federal response still needs to be better,” Louisiana Hospital Association president John Matessino said.
Between 500 and 600 hospital and home-based medical patients were sent out of state for Hurricane Gustav, state health officials said.
“Things did not work well getting some of the planes and assets to evacuate people in a timely manner,” Matessino said.
“Planes did not show up on time. The same thing happened this time (as during Katrina): wrong planes, planes came with no staffing.”
When out-of-state ambulances were not available before hurricane landfall, state Department of Health and Hospitals Secretary Alan Levine said helicopters were used to move patients more quickly. He said the helicopters were not part of the original plan.
Another 8,200 people from 92 nursing homes were moved from hurricane-vulnerable areas, Levine said.
Ambulance service was a “little sketchy” at first in nursing home evacuations, because many of the ambulances brought in to help were held in place and not released for service, Louisiana Nursing Home Association executive Joe Donchess said.
“That caused a little bit of anxiety,” he said.
There was a 12- to 24-hour delay sometimes with ambulances waiting for instructions on where to go to pick up patients, Donchess said.
Levine said he is looking for ways to stop such mass evacuations.
“We need a discussion about non-coastal nursing homes. Is there a better way to handle non-coastal nursing homes where we can help them shelter in place with proper resources instead of evacuating?” Levine said.
Health-care officials also mentioned communications problems that need to be ironed out for the future.
Levine said there probably needs to be a uniform communications system among hospitals.
“The most important thing is if they can reach us or their local Office of Emergency Preparedness,” and there were some problems this time around, he said.
Baton Rouge-area hospital executives said they are working on a better communications systems for physicians and staff so they can be reached more timely when regular telecommunications systems are sporadic or not working at all.
Baton Rouge hospitals were without power in the wake of Hurricane Gustav which knocked out electricity and sometimes phones and other communications services for hundreds of thousands of people.
“Things change very, very quickly and so you need a system that is very efficient and you get information out to many, many people in a very short period of time,” said Cindy Munn, incident commander for Baton Rouge General Medical Center’s Mid-City and Bluebonnet campuses.
Woman’s Hospital is getting physicians connected to text messaging, which seemed to work the best during the hurricane efforts, Woman’s CEO Teri Fontenot said.
The hurricane also amplified what happens when Earl K. Long – the area’s “safety net” hospital – has to close and evacuate its patients because of power problems, said Mitch Wasden, chief executive officer of Ochsner Medical Center in Baton Rouge.
The people using the public hospital end up at other area hospitals, which need “an adequate amount of payment to cover the costs,” Wasden said.
“We are left getting some kind of payment down the road.”
Because of power outages across the Baton Rouge area, it was more difficult to discharge patients home because they did not have electricity, Munn and Fontenot said.
Some patients had to stay beyond length-of-stay guidelines established for private and government insurance payments, they said.
Fontenot said there may need to be some “relaxed criteria” when it comes to patient-discharge time limits because of home conditions and lack of access to pharmacies.
