D.C.’s emergency rooms are among the least prepared in the country to handle a major terrorist attack despite the city’s status as a major target, according to a congressional survey released Monday.
The District’s emergency medical system is incapable of handling a mass casualty event on the scale of the 2004 Madrid bombing, which killed 191 and injured 2,000, said the report.
The review by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform found that two of the District’s three Level I trauma hospitals were operating above capacity on the afternoon of March 25, when committee staff began their investigation of 34 trauma centers in seven major cities. D.C. and Los Angeles were considered the worst of the group.
“The emergency care systems were stretched to the breaking point and had no capacity to respond to a surge of victims,” Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the committee chairman, said during the first day of a two-day hearing on the subject.
Both the George Washington University Hospital and Washington Hospital Center had “no available treatment space in the emergency room to accommodate new patients” at the time, committee staff found. Washington Hospital Center was the worst of any facility surveyed nationwide, operating at 286 percent above capacity.
Dr. Mark Smith, chairman of emergency medicine at the center, acknowledged his department, like all ERs, is overcrowded and not designed to handle daily swings in patient numbers. The hospital has plans to build a new department with “capacity, capability and protection” in mind. But the project is likely to cost $90 million and take four years to finish.
In the meantime, Smith said, a major disaster will send area hospitals into “overdrive.”
“You shift into a different mode where you create space and you discharge patients who could handle being sent home a little bit earlier,” Smith said.
