Tag: U.S. hospitals

Boom-and-bust federal funding after 9/11 undercut hospitals’ preparedness for pandemics

Washington Post logoDays after 9/11, Congress awarded Washington Hospital Center millions of dollars to design a new emergency department that would treat mass casualties from a terrorist attack or infectious disease and serve as a model for hospitals across the country.

Architects crafted plans for an eight-story, spacecraft-shaped, blast-proof emergency department they called “ER One.” Experts drew up a 1,000-page report on best practices for emergency operations, and the project secured an initial investment of about $30 million in federal and district funding.

But then Congress lost interest. Continue reading.

Hospitals face shortage of drugs for ventilators

The Hill logoHospitals are facing yet another new obstacle in the fight against the coronavirus: They are running low on the drugs needed to put patients on ventilators to keep them alive.

While much attention has been placed on the desperate hunt for more ventilators, the machines are useless unless they are accompanied by drugs to sedate patients and eliminate pain.

Now hospitals, particularly in hard-hit areas such as New York, say those drugs are getting scarce, along with the ventilators themselves. Continue reading.

This is the coronavirus math that has experts so worried: Running out of ventilators, hospital beds

Washington Post logoFor weeks now, America’s leaders and its public have been obsessed with one set of numbers: How many people have died? How many confirmed cases? And in what states?

But to understand why experts are so alarmed and what may be coming next, the public needs to start paying attention to a whole other set of numbers: How many ventilators do we have in this country? How many hospital beds? How many doctors and nurses? And most importantly, how many sick people can they all treat at the same time?

Consider the ventilators

For those severely ill with a respiratory disease such as covid-19, ventilators are a matter of life or death because they allow patients to breathe when they cannot on their own