By Healthcare Facilities Today

During natural disasters, doctors face impossible choices because our creaking medical infrastructure leaves American hospitals, nursing homes and high-rises for the elderly vulnerable to even the most foreseeable events, according to a comment by Sheri Fink posted on the New York Times web site.  Plans to get patients out of harm’s way, Fink said, are also inadequate.

Sheri Fink is the author of “Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital.”

Since Sandy hit a year ago, hard-working health and hospital officials have made good progress in defining the risks, but less headway in actually implementing solutions. We need to do more. Over a third of the beds in New York City’s hospitals and nursing homes and more than half of those in adult care facilities are in hurricane evacuation zones. Vital mechanical elements remain unprotected in basements or on lower floors, the article said

We need both immediate and long-term solutions, according to Fink. On a federal level, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services should release long-delayed emergency preparedness requirements. C.M.S. should also adopt updated life safety code standards from 2012 that require new health care facilities to protect electrical components. Amazingly, the government is still relying on weaker standards from 2000.

"States and localities can also impose more stringent building codes. New York City and New York State have proposed that any newly constructed hospitals or those undergoing significant renovations be floodproofed to a 500-year flood standard and that air-conditioning be able to run on emergency power. This needs to be replicated elsewhere. Rural areas, which have fewer hospitals, making them less replaceable, need help, too," Fink wrote.

Read the article.