New emergency funds won't 'trickle down'?
The amount of funds allocated for emergency preparedness in President Bush's newly presented fiscal year 2007 budget may look good on paper, but as a practical matter, they won't be much help to individual hospitals, says one expert.
"The real question is, how much of the budget actually trickles down to the individual hospital?" poses Andrew I. Bern, MD, FACEP, founder and past chair of the disaster medical section of the American College of Emergency Physicians.
$8,300 per hospital
Bern points out that the budget includes $414 million for the Hospital Preparedness Cooperative Grant program, which provides funds to support disaster preparedness drills. He further notes that the American Hospital Association estimates there are 5,000 hospitals in the United States, which means about $8,300 per hospital under the grant program. However, he observes, when the state of Ohio studied the financial outlays of a communitywide drill in 1984, they found that the coordinating hospital spent $100,000 and participating hospitals spent $50,000 each.
"When you do the math and spread it out, [the money] is just not going to reach everybody, and the states are completely on their own in terms of paying the bills," says Bern, despite the fact that The Joint Commission requires at least one annual communitywide drill.
In Israel, he notes, "they literally train as much as once per month per hospital, and they also have unannounced drills."
To handle the added space demands of a disaster, 20% of licensed bed capacity in that country is available for surge capacity. "They can literally empty out 20% of their hospitals at any given time," he notes. "This country does not have anything like that."
The amount of funds allocated for emergency preparedness in President Bush's newly presented fiscal year 2007 budget may look good on paper, but as a practical matter, they won't be much help to individual hospitals, says one expert.You have reached your article limit for the month. Subscribe now to access this article plus other member-only content.
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