“In the immediate emergency there’s concern around drowning, and especially for folks who are in motor vehicles where there is severe flooding, blunt trauma, fire-related injuries,” said Marisa Raphael, deputy commissioner of the Office of Emergency Preparedness and Response at the New York City Health Department. Vulnerable populations, like the homeless, the elderly and the
“Water poured into hospitals. Ambulances were caught up in roiling floodwaters. Medical transport helicopters were grounded by high winds. Houston’s world-renowned health care infrastructure found itself battered by Hurricane Harvey, struggling to treat storm victims while becoming a victim itself…. The response to Harvey, now a tropical storm but still wreaking havoc over the state,
When I was growing up in Queens in the late mid-1950s the two “go-to” hospitals were Long Island Jewish and Booth Memorial. In the early 1970’s the hospital system in the NYC metropolitan area was anchored and dominated by internationally renowned academic medical centers (then defined as a medical school and its primary teaching hospital
About twenty years ago as President of LibertyHealth each of our hospitals (a medical school affiliated teaching hospital and two community hospitals) had an ICU. I was always concerned that sometimes patient acuity in one of the community hospital ICUs might have exceeded its capability and pushed for clear clinical threshholds for patient transfer to
A little background…. I was appointed President and CEO of Jersey City Medical Center (JCMC) in 1989, one year after JCMC had been converted to not-for-profit governance after a long and colorful history as a public hospital (including bankruptcy protection from 1982 to 1985). JCMC was and still is Hudson County’s (500,000+ residents) regional referral
From 1967 to 1970, during the Vietnam War, I served first as a 2nd Lieutenant and Chief Administrative Officer of the 4th Casualty Staging Flight attached to Wilford Hall USAF Medical Center, Lackland AFB in San Antonio, Texas. We received combat casualties still in battlefield bandages, often within 24 hours of injury, and either admitted
Remember when a hospital was just a hospital, and its reputation spoke for itself? Now we have a plethora of self named healthcare institutions such as clinics, community hospitals, institutes, medical centers, national hospitals, specialty hospitals, and teaching hospitals. My home state of New Jersey, for example, started with one children’s hospital in Newark, followed