THE US military has temporarily halted medical evacuation flights for Haitians critically injured in last month’s earthquake, after Florida officials told the Obama administration that the state’s hospitals were becoming too crowded.
The decision has alarmed doctors trying to treat the crush of wounded in the devastated country. Dr Barth Green, who oversees a field hospital in the Haitian capital run by the charity Project Medishare, said some patients could die if they did not reach foreign medical facilities soon.
“We have to resume these flights. Letting them die, that’s not America,” said Dr Green, who tried on Saturday to find private donors to underwrite the cost of alternative flights.
A White House spokesman, Tommy Vietor, said officials were scrambling to find available medical facilities in other states so the military flights could resume.
The military suspended the evacuation flights after Florida governor Charlie Crist told the federal government in a letter on Wednesday that Florida’s medical facilities were “quickly reaching saturation, especially in the area of high-level trauma care”.
Florida hospitals had treated 526 earthquake victims up to Saturday, with 174 inpatients still in the facilities, state officials said.
Mr Crist’s letter, addressed to US health and human services secretary Kathleen Sebelius, did not rule out receiving additional patients. However, it was cited by Capt Kevin Aandahl of the navy, a spokesman for the US transportation command, as a reason for the suspension of flights.
“We do medical evacuation and we do it well, but we can’t fly anyone without an accepting hospital on the other end,” Capt Aandahl said.
In his letter, Mr Crist, a Republican, complained of a “lack of co-ordination by federal authorities” as Florida grappled with receiving hundreds of injured Haitians and more than 15,000 US and other citizens evacuated after the 7.0-magnitude quake on January 12th.
The tipping point came, the governor said, when he learned plans were under way to send to Florida hospitals 30 to 50 critically injured patients a day for an indefinite period.
“Florida does not have the capacity to support such an operation,” he wrote, noting that the state was in the midst of its tourist and “snowbird” migration season.
Mr Crist urged Ms Sebelius to activate the national disaster medical system, which provides funding and personnel for catastrophes and moves patients to hospitals in states unaffected by a crisis.
He asked for an answer within 48 hours. No response had been received by Saturday, according to Mr Crist’s spokesman, Sterling Ivey.
The White House spokesman said no policy decision had been made to end the medical evacuation flights, adding that the problem was merely the lack of bed space in hospitals.
Asked why patients could not simply be flown to states other than Florida, he said officials were trying to identify bases where large military aircraft could land and offload patients who could then be taken swiftly to hospitals with available beds.
“There’s an extraordinary interagency, international, cross-governmental effort going on to do everything we can to increase space,” he said.
“But as you know, this is a disaster of unprecedented magnitude. That includes medical needs of unprecedented magnitude.”
The quake killed at least 120,000 people and injured thousands. Mr Vietor said US government health workers had treated more than 18,000 people in Haiti and the navy has dispatched a hospital ship, the 1,000-bed USNS Comfort.
In his letter, Mr Crist also said activating the national disaster system would not only spread the patient load to other states, but would “ensure states are appropriately reimbursed for their services” to earthquake victims.
Florida hospitals have spent at least $8.7 million (€6.3 million) caring for survivors of the quake so far, according to John Cherry, director of external affairs for the Florida state emergency response team.
But Mr Cherry insisted the dispute was not over money.
Instead, he said, Florida officials were frustrated that there seemed to be no national plan for where to send the injured as their state’s facilities fill.
“We feel like it’s Groundhog Day. Every day we come in and say, ‘Where’s the plan?’” he said. “We’re ready to assist.”
– (Washington Post-Bloomberg)