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Response Equipment
October 23, 2007
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For the past four years Cape Coral Hospital’s been preparing for the worst. The
disaster preparedness team has been training for all different types of scenarios.
Dr. Timothy Dougherty is the Medial Director of Disaster Preparedness at Cape Coral
Hospital.
He says, “Disaster is a broad term. I’d say the most likely disaster that
is going to occur for us in Southwest Florida is a hurricane so that’s first and
foremost on the training.”
Connie Bowles is an Emergency Services Project Coordinator for Lee Memorial Health
System. Although they have a lot of vehicles and equipment that stay onsite at hospitals
they are also prepared to travel to the scene of a disaster. “Say Sanibel is affected
by a hurricane and we need to get some medical care out there. We can take a vehicle
put it out there with air conditioning and lighting put a doctor out there and he
can start to see patients,” says Bowles.
Thanks to
hundreds of thousands of dollars in homeland security grants, Cape Coral
Hospital’s disaster preparedness teams is well trained and well stocked with equipment
versatile enough for a variety of disaster scenarios.
Dr. Dougherty says, “Chemical spills on I-75, that’s also a very real possibility.
We’re very close to a very busy airport so that’s also one of the scenarios that
we prepare for.”
Bowles says the training focus is widening every year. “The first several years
they focused on contaminated patients and so the reason we received a lot of respirator
suits, boots, gloves and decon shower training.”
If Southwest Florida experienced a chemical attack or accident, victims from Sarasota to Naples would be brought to Cape Coral Hospital. There a team is prepared to decontaminate
hundreds of patients at a time.
“The fire department and EMS would do a gross decon in the field and then bring them to us, where we would do a secondary with soap and water. So essentially the
decon unit you see behind me is a massive shower,” says Bowles.
Dr. Dougherty says the system has already been tested in real events. “We’ve actually utilized it on several occasions both in practice scenarios and we’ve also had four
or five times that we brought six or seven people in at a time from different events
that have been exposed to potentially life threatening illnesses.”
Dr. Dougherty says one of the most important parts of their training is learning
to work together with EMS, Fire and Police. Hospitals have to front the funds for
disaster preparedness training and equipment. The government pays back the money through Homeland Security grants.
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