HLTH 6300 Week 6 Response Partner Peer Reply Example

Week 6 Discussion: Peer Reply

The Partner Your Account Left Out: The Regional Health Care Coalition in the Hurricane Response

Reply to Jordan B.

Jordan, your account of the hurricane response covers the agencies that appeared in the news coverage: the state emergency management agency, FEMA, the National Guard, the Red Cross and the county sheriff. It is a clear account of those agencies. I want to add a partner that carried real work but does not appear in it: the regional health care coalition.

Health care coalitions are regional groups of hospitals, emergency medical services, public health departments, long-term care facilities and other health organizations that plan together and coordinate during emergencies. National capability guidance for health care preparedness sets out what coalitions are expected to do, including sharing information on bed availability and supplies, coordinating patient movement and supporting facilities that must evacuate or shelter in place (Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, 2016).

What the Coalition Did

In your case, three pieces of work belong to the coalition. First, before landfall, it ran a daily bed availability report across the region's hospitals and nursing homes, which let the two coastal nursing homes find receiving facilities for their residents within a day. Second, when one hospital lost generator power on the second night, the coalition's coordination center arranged the transfer of its ventilator patients to three other hospitals, matching each patient to an available bed and ambulance. Third, it shared oxygen and dialysis supplies among facilities when deliveries were delayed by closed roads. These details come from the after-action summary included in the case materials you cited, in its health and medical section; I have summarized rather than quoted, and the hospital count is approximate.

Why It Matters to Your Account

Leaving the coalition out changes your conclusion in one place. You credit the county emergency operations center with the successful hospital evacuation on the second night. National response guidance places health and medical coordination in its own function, with public health and health care partners leading it (Federal Emergency Management Agency, 2019), and in your case the coalition did most of that work. The emergency operations center supported it with transport and fuel. The distinction matters because a future plan that strengthened only the emergency operations center would miss the organization that actually matched patients to beds. The incident management system expects such partners to be connected through liaisons and coordination centers rather than absorbed into a single command (Federal Emergency Management Agency, 2017), which is what happened in your case.

I would suggest adding a short paragraph on the coalition and revising the sentence on the hospital evacuation. If your sources describe the coalition's role differently, I would be glad to see them.

Note on the Choice of Partner

I considered adding the electric utility, which restored power to the hospitals, or a voluntary agency that ran feeding sites. I chose the coalition because its work bore most directly on the outcome your account highlights, the survival of hospital patients during the outage, and because coalitions are the partner most often missing from accounts built on news coverage.

References

Federal Emergency Management Agency. (2017). National Incident Management System (3rd ed.).

Federal Emergency Management Agency. (2019). National response framework (4th ed.).

Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response. (2016). 2017-2022 health care preparedness and response capabilities. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.