News
On the ground in Haiti, the American College of Surgeons humanitarian effort is using hand-held devices to track patients because there is no better way. The effort also is aimed at learning from this collected information about how future disasters could be handled, which was reported in Medpage Today, January 29, 2010.
According to the full Washington Post story, a separate, urgent issue concerns those patients who need to be transported out of Haiti.
Florida hospitals are saying that they cannot take more patients in their hospitals, the story says.
In the meantime, to take patients elsewhere, there are two key requirements.
First, there has to be an accepting hospital for every patient transported.
Second, the kinds of planes equipped for such rescue require military landing facilities, according to White House spokesman, Tommy Vietor.
“The U.S. military has temporarily halted medical evacuation flights for Haitians critically injured in this month’s earthquake, after Florida officials told the Obama administration that the state’s hospitals are becoming too crowded, officials said Saturday.
“The decision has alarmed doctors trying to treat the crush of wounded in the devastated country. Barth Green, who oversees a field hospital in the Haitian capital run by the charity Project Medishare, said some patients could perish if they did not reach foreign medical facilities soon.
“We have to resume these flights. Letting them die, that’s not America,” said Green, who labored Saturday to find private donors to underwrite the cost of alternative flights.”
White House spokesman, Tommy Vietor, said:
…“There’s an extraordinary interagency, international, cross-governmental effort going on to do everything we can to increase space,” he said. “But as you know, this is a disaster of unprecedented magnitude. That includes medical needs of unprecedented magnitude.” (Emphasis added)Source: Washington Post, January 30, 2010
Source: Medpage Today, January 29, 2010
