The equipment failures at NYU and nearby Bellevue Hospital, the nation’s oldest and one of its busiest, brought to the fore what emergency experts have warned for years. Despite bitter lessons from the recent past, U.S. hospitals are far from ready to protect patients when disaster strikes their facilities.
For most hospitals, “emergency preparedness” means being ready to treat a surge of patients from an earthquake or terror attack – disasters outside their walls. Even the federal program that coordinates hospitals’ preparedness at the Department of Health and Human Services has this mindset: it focuses on planning for mass fatalities and quickly reporting their number of available beds, not having redundant electrical systems.
For hospital administrators trying to keep their institutions in the black, disaster-resistant infrastructure is expensive and lacks the sex appeal of robotic surgery suites and proton-beam cancer therapy to attract patients.
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