Hospitals Evacuated due to Spreading Wildfires in Northern California

For this blog post I chose to write about the wildfires in California, that are forcing hospitals to evacuating patients. CNN reported on October 9th, “Hospitals evacuated and many injured as wildfires ravage Northern California.” The wildfires in Northern California have decimated nearly 57,000 acres and have destroyed everything in its path. Two hospitals have had to evacuate patients to other hospitals to avoid being in the path of the wildfires. Kaiser Permanente’s Santa Rosa medical center had to evacuate 130 patients by ambulance and city buses. In the report, it states how ever since the start of the wildfires local hospitals have seen overflow of patients coming in with injuries from the fires such as, serious burns and breathing issues.

Like in my other post, Controlled Chaos at Las Vegas Trauma Center , hospitals need to be able to respond to whatever is at hand. Every day we hear of natural disasters taking lives and causing injury and illness. Hospitals must work in over drive to provide care for the victims and bring them back to good health. In this example, the wildfires are causing many different aliments that needed to be treated in different ways. The burn victims need skin grafts and while those suffering from smoke inhalation need to be on oxygen machines to breath. When situations like these occurs, hospitals needed to adapt to a new workflow and overcome to provide the best care to their abilities.

CNN Article 

Comments

  1. Mark BonicaOctober 14, 2017 at 3:19 PM

    We certainly are getting to look at a lot of disaster planning this semester!

    ReplyDelete
  2. MelissaOctober 18, 2017 at 7:51 PM

    I have received FEMA training and this is just the type of events we plan for, what do we do when we need to evacuate, what do we do to help our community, how many patients can we treat/transfer, etc. How many days of water supply do we have, how long can our generators run before we need to refuel? These are all things we have in our contingency plan as Medical Emergency Planners, additionally, we become part of the community Operations Centers and we plan with our local partners taking care of each other and our communities. I have seen this in Las Vegas, Californians came here to help us and now we are sending people there to help them. If only the rest of our world could work together like this.

    ReplyDelete

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