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San Diego hospitals enact mutual aid post-haste

Emergency Management Alert, October 30, 2007

While fires moved through San Diego last week, area hospitals wasted no time in enacting evacuation plans, as reported in an October 22 North County Times (CA) article:

At the 107-bed Pomerado Hospital and the 129-bed skilled nursing facility Villa Pomerado, located in Poway, the evacuations began just before 9 a.m. Employees began using buses borrowed from the Poway Unified School District and Poway Fire Department ambulances to move about 80 patients from Pomerado and 122 from Villa Pomerado to several other San Diego-area hospitals.

"The only way we could really guarantee the safety of our patients was to make [the] decision earlier rather than later to get our patients out of there," Andy Hoang, a spokesman for Pomerado Hospital, told a reporter at about 3 p.m. on October 22. "And it was a good thing we did. Just an hour ago, a San Diego police officer came and ordered everyone (who was not essential) to evacuate."

Also evacuating was Fallbrook Hospital, which, with Pomerado, sent some patients to Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside. Hospital spokesman Jeff Segal told the Times that the hospital's ED had treated 91 patients by 5 p.m., a number apparently twice that seen on a normal day. Suellyn Ellerbe, the hospital's CEO and chief nurse executive, said that the facility had set up two large tents on its grounds and was assessing and treating patients in the temporary quarters. Segal and Ellerbe said that "many of those [ED] cases involved people suffering from respiratory problems brought on by smoke and ash."

The article also noted that "hospital administrators throughout the region said they had canceled elective surgeries, pushed up the evaluations of patients who might be ready for discharge, called in extra staff members and taken other steps to ensure their ability to handle patients displaced from the Fallbrook and Poway hospitals."

Read more here.

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