Emergency hospital disaster plan developed

BALTIMORE, Dec. 7 (UPI) -- U.S. medical researchers say hospitals planning for a surge of disaster victims should begin with a strategy to empty beds of relatively healthy patients.

The researchers, led by Dr. Gabor Kelen, director of emergency medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital, say data suggest such a strategy could safely empty 70 percent of a hospital's inpatient population within 72 hours.

Kelen said his panel believes all hospitals should continually rank patients according to how sick they are and assign a constantly updated "score." That number would be used during an emergency to eliminate the emotional effects of deciding which patients to discharge, keep or send to another facility.

Health care officials fear few U.S. hospitals could deal with the extraordinarily large numbers of causalities that can be produced by a natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina, a possible terrorist attack like Sept. 11, or epidemics.

"Without this sort of system in place, the worry is a hospital's resources would be quickly overwhelmed in a major crisis," said Kelenl. "So not only would the disaster victims not get adequate treatment, but neither would the patients who are already hospitalized."