LV hospitals not ready for chemical, biological crisis

Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2001 | 10:04 a.m.

A University of Nevada, Las Vegas, professor who surveyed Southern Nevada's 11 hospitals said they would be easily overburdened by a mass casualty event involving chemical or biological agents.

The number of patients they could handle would depend on the type of chemical or pathogen involved, assistant professor Chris Cochran said Tuesday.

Cochran, who teaches health care administration, discussed his survey at the HazMat Explo conference and exposition that runs through Thursday at the Orleans hotel-casino. Conference participants include public safety workers and medical professionals from throughout the country.

Cochran said an event that produces at least 1,000 casualties would be highly problematic for local hospitals, most of which operate at full capacity.

"In a community where hospitals are constantly on divert, we do have the potential for having a very unorganized situation for hospitals because they would be so heavily overtaxed," he said. "We need more hospital beds, but we also need the people to staff those beds. The biggest problem we would have in any large event would be the manpower issue."

The survey was taken from Aug. 1 through Sept. 30, meaning it was conceived before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The hospitals surveyed have a total of 2,972 beds, including 314 in emergency rooms and 129 in isolation areas.

Although the survey results will not be released publicly for at least another week, Cochran hinted at some of the shortcomings he found. Most hospitals, for instance, reported that they did not have enough personal protective equipment for medical professionals to handle contaminated patients.

"A lot of the equipment they did have was in their environmental control areas, but there was no easy access for the emergency departments," Cochran said.

The equipment shortages could be relieved by next year, thanks to a Justice Department grant to Las Vegas to prepare against attacks from weapons of mass destruction.

Cochran said decontamination could be another problem for hospitals. Seven of the 11 hospitals have decontamination shower facilities designed to funnel the contaminated water away from other areas of the hospital. But six of the seven hospitals with such facilities have only one shower head each. Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center, the exception, has three.

"If we are dealing with large numbers of patients, hospitals will have to find other ways to decontaminate," Cochran said. "That's because they either don't have the facilities or the facilities they do have are not enough."

Chances are, however, that most casualties would be decontaminated by emergency responders close to the scene of the incident, Cochran said. It so happens that local emergency rescue teams are armed with doff-it kits, which enable individuals to strip out of contaminated clothes while wearing something that resembles a parka.

Among the recommendations he received from the medical professionals he surveyed was the desire to improve communications between the hospitals and the field where the incident occurred.

"When you have multiple jurisdictions involved you have multiple communications, so that has to be worked out," Cochran said.