This comes as no surprise to many health care providers and public health officials: most states are unprepared for health crises.
Few states are equipped to handle emergency medical crises such as a terrorist attack, a natural disaster or an influenza outbreak, according to an analysis being released today by the American College of Emergency Physicians.Emergency care specialists such as [Angela] Gardner said they expected to find some deficiencies in a field that has seen budget cuts and rising demand. But the panel was startled at how poorly prepared the nation is as a whole to manage trauma, whether in individual patients or in the event of a large-scale disaster.
"We have no capacity to handle a Hurricane Katrina or an avian flu outbreak," Gardner said in an interview yesterday. "We can barely handle a regular flu outbreak."
Locally, the report illustrated how government action -- and inaction -- affect health care. The District nearly failed in the category of public health, largely because it lags far behind in government-funded programs for infants, the elderly and injured workers. Virginia's low grade overall was attributable primarily to a state malpractice system that has sent specialists fleeing to friendlier legal environments, Gardner said.
The report supported what many Americans have experienced directly -- long waits in overcrowded emergency rooms, loss of health insurance, and specialist shortages in areas such as neurosurgery and obstetrics. Many patients are facing higher bills and traveling longer distances to receive needed care, the authors found.
What's needed immediately? More doctors, nurses, and beds.
I harp on this a lot, but this just again shows why sectioning off funds specifically for "bioterrorism" or "avian flu" isn't a great idea--they're just stopgap measures, band-aids. We need to improve the entire infrastructure to *really* be prepared for emergencies like these--whether it's a natural disaster, a new pandemic, or a bioterrorist event. Of course, politicians know that's a much tougher thing to do than to throw money at the disease of the week. Just keep this in mind the next time you hear what's been done to make us "safer," when what would actually help to keep us safe would be to work to improve the health care for the entire country.
This story broke not long after I read comments (on one of your posts perhaps) that demonstrate that some education systems have long been avoiding the evolution controversy by stripping biology down to anatomy and memorization so that students find the subject too boring to pursue.
Let us see: there is a need for doctors and nurses and pharmacists on the one hand and an effort to undermine biology and science in the public school system on the other.
[sarcasm] I'm sure there will be no trouble reconciling that. [/sarcasm]
I wish that Canadian emergency rooms had been included in the analysis because I think a lot of people think that Canada's system is far better than it is. I also happen to remember high school biology up here in Canada to have been pretty sterile. Perhaps there are just as many creationists in Canada's education systems but they are not as over-reaching as the Dover and Kansas folk.
Having been on a volunteer emergency squad since 1973, I'm always torn when I see an article like that. On the one hand, yeah, things are far from as good as they ought to be. On the other hand, things are a helluva lot better than they were 30 years ago when we'd run a trauma victim to the (purported) ER and watch the GP pulling ER duty that night wring his hands and hope the local thoracic surgeon (the only vaguely ER-qualified guy in the city) would get there soon. I watched save-able patients die in the ER under precisely those circumstances.
Now we run to an actual ER with actual ER-qualified docs. So it's all in the context of comparison.
Oh, I have no doubt that things are (and have been) improving. I know in my hometown hospital, I went there for a broken wrist when I was a kid and the ER was barely functional. Took my husband there about 5 years ago (dirtbike accident at 24, sheesh) and I was very impressed with all the changes. Even so, there was an article in the hometown paper in around 2002 after the anthrax attacks and they were discussing surge capacity (should there be a bioterrorism attack in rural Ohio :) ) and it was still lacking, to put it mildly. And of course, the nursing shortage is nothing new.