6.2. Hospital care

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6.2.1.Hospital admission and treatmentatencion hospitalaria

The alerted hospitals should activate their contingency mechanisms, based on pre-established disaster preparedness plans that define the measures to be put in place to transfer the routine organization of health services into a system to respond to the emergency, using all the institution’s resources. Hospital-based triage teams may reclassify patients upon admission. Read more about hospital disaster preparedness and consider a Disaster Planning Checklist.

6.2.2. Redistribution of patients to other hospitals

Decisions to redistribute patients to other hospitals should be carefully considered, given that this made complicate the situation. However, several reasons might justify such a decision:

  • The hospital’s facilities have suffered damage that seriously limits their capacity to function.
  • The hospital lacks sufficient resources to serve the extraordinary demand.
  • The severity of the patients’ injuries requires care in hospitals of another level.

Each transfer of victims should be subject to proper administrative control to restrict transfers to a limited number of patients requiring specialized care that is not available in the affected area.

If a hospital is going to refer patients to another facility, good communications should be maintained between hospitals in order to stay abreast of the capacity to receive patients.