Health Communications on Hurricane Katrina - Essay Example

Health Communication On Katrina. Introduction: The unpredictable nature that is commonly inherent with natural catastrophes is a grave challenge that undermines the prolific technological advances of our contemporary society. Environmental disasters unfold in different shapes and sizes that live a devastating blow upon any continent tearing apart the social fabric as horrible as the physical infrastructure. From historical accounts, Pompeii and Herculaneum cities were permanently buried under the hot ejecta that erupted from Vesuvuius in 79AD. St, Pierre Martique of the Antilles was annihilated by a volcanic eruption in 1902 and never rebuilt. Only one man survived. Earthquake stroke Kobe Japan a few years ago killing 200,000 people. True, however is the recent ruthless, Hurricane Katrina hit of Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf Coast August 29, as a Category 4 hurricane with sustained winds of 145 mph It flooded 90,000 square miles displacing 400,000 people. 1 The official death toll now stands at 1,302 and the damage estimated from $70 to $130 billion. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) over one million persons were displaced, and hundreds of thousands remain dispersed throughout the U.S. including some 200,000 people staying in 65,000 rooms in 10,000 hotels or motels nationwide. Additional thousands are reportedly still housed in Texas churches. Forty-three states are now eligible for federal assistance to help meet needs of evacutees. More than 200,000 people also lost their jobs across the affected Gulf region. However, experience from the historical disasters has established a dichotomy between disaster and peoples resilience. People have been able to adapt very first by embarking on reconstruction regardless of the impact. Resilience: In the wake of Katrina for example resilience has gained a new relevance. Relatively, resilience and catastrophes are two inseparable entities that depend on demographics and the impact of the devastation. Just as some people can fend off traumatic illness while others succumb, not all cities are equally of rebounding from a shock to the system. A person whose health is compromised to begin with, has less chance of recovery than an individual in full health. So too is a city. New Orleans, which already was burdened with huge social and economic problems long before Katrina arrival have played a major role in determining how well the Crescent City will recover from the storm and its aftermath. Urban resilience, moreover, is not necessarily progressive. In spite of the seeming tabular Rasa opportunity a major disaster can offer to correct old errors and put things right, reconstruction tends to favor the status quo. Even if city buildings are toppled, foundations are often reusable and property lines remain. Insurance claims and simple inertia help push landowners to rebuild more or less what they lost. The deep psychological need to see things put quickly back the way they were has also had a positive impact on resiliency and thereof reconstruction. While a disaster can trigger a host of long-term innovations, these tend not to surface in the immediate wake of a catastrophe. Visionary schemes have been the stuff of good times, when people can afford the luxury of debating possible future. The last thing people want to do in the middle of a disaster is wait around for the minute of a brave new plan to be refined for implementation. When London burned in 1666, Christopher Wren, John Evelyn's and others, full of axial boulevards and capacious plazas; all remained on paper, floated grand schemes. What Londoners returned to instead, was a city that looked and felt much as it did before the conflagration. And while Chicago great fire of 1871 eventually yielded a city of fire-proof masonry buildings as well as the first skyscrapers, the initial reconstruction phase fell back to erecting very kinds of rickety firetraps that caused the catastrophe in the first place. This notion of regressive resilience extends also to a city social order and political culture. Just as the built environment is commonly reconstituted as before, the power structure and social hierarchy of a city can quickly replicate itself in the wake of a catastrophe.2 Health Strategic Changes: Health care is a basic service and central to any reconstruction effort. The availability of health care services in this case is therefore one of the factors that can affect the magnitude of resilience of the people in any aftermath. The dream to recovering New Orleans, to its former state with a close view on diversity, scope and complexity transcends beyond brick and mortar. Katrina's impact on the infrastructure, culture, sociology, demographics, health care system, educational system, municipalities and mental health is a global disaster that entails a lot. In the meantime long-term decisions about the health care system in New Orleans are affected by uncertainties about the future. Any effective strategy for rebuilding New Orleans' health care systems is addressing both demand-side and supply-side constraints. Prior to Katrina, the share of low-income adults receiving public health insurance was low by national standards (though low-income children were more adequately covered), and New Orleans relied primarily on a single public hospital to deliver care to low-income and uninsured residents. 3This hospital has essentially been damaged beyond repair, leaving low-income residents with no reliable source of medical care. Hospitals are being opened with reduced bed capacity, and MCLNO has been operating a limited emergency care clinic called "Spirit of Charity" at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in downtown New Orleans. Spirit of Charity medical personnel have been employing donated Air. Force field mobile hospital tents and portable buildings set up on the convention center floor to handle minor emergencies such as simple fractures and lacerations, conduct medical assessments, and managements. Federal Iniative. The federal government consideration of the immediate funding for new communications system, that would prepare hospitals and nursing homes for future disasters and the covering of the cost moving critical equipment at local hospitals to flood-proof elevations. On the other hand the committees move to initiate a close working relationship with social service agencies and organizations to identify and track people with medical conditions or disabilities that might make evacuation from their homes difficult, if not impossible. Massive Interviews have been carried out extensively to get healthcare information services. Daily reviews of data submitted daily by hospitals to the Internet database about the bed capacities in Charity Hospital, the MCLNO has helped the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to evaluate the funding prospects. Emergency Care: Increased demand for opening emergency departments has taken center stage; this has led to slow the unloading of patients from ambulances by housing patients being in the emergency department due to inadequacy. According to data reported by hospitals on February 22, 2006, wait times for emergency medical services (EMS) vehicles to offload stable patients into emergency departments varied from no wait at some hospitals to as long as 2 hours reported by 2 hospitals, and hospitals reported that 38 patients had been admitted and were being housed in the emergency department. Short-Term Needs: The environmental damages caused by sediment, including high concentrations of heavy metals (e.g., arsenic), petroleum components, and pesticides potent a horrible environmental disaster upon the community mental health that moots a public health concern. The toxins in the sediment could put the population at a higher risk of contracting certain cancers, neurological problems, and kidney or liver damage. Ensuring a safe environment to its public the federal government has to increase the availability of mental health services, especially to uninsured low-income individuals, by expanding of public insurance to all low-income individuals or subsidizing the purchase of private coverage regardless of their household status.4 Long Term. Ultimately, this long-term planning initiative will use a broad; multi-media outreach effort to reach hundreds of thousands of Louisianans, at home and displaced, to complete the development of South Louisiana's regional vision. The board also approved the use of federal Community Development Block Grants as match dollars to help local communities rebuild the almost $10 billion in public infrastructure destroyed in hurricanes Katrina and Rita. While FEMA's Public Assistance program will fund 90% of the repairs to sewer systems, schools, universities, and other infrastructure, there is a non-federal match required, which the LRA is recommending to Governor Blanco and the Louisiana Legislature for approval. Electronic Database Systems In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, many paper medical records were destroyed. 5This has prompted the urgency of replacing the old paper system with electronic health records that expand across the entire Gulf Coast residents. The National institute of Health has responded by funding the immediate reconstruction of health systems in devastated New Orleans by embracing information technology to improve the healthcare. The grant encompasses projects in Michigan Louisiana, Texas and Florida that will initially provide mental health services to those in need. Part of the grant will involve examining policies on whether doctors who are not licensed in one state can provide services to a patient in another state. Through State Infrastructure Programme. Hurricane Katrina demolished 1,500 state buildings leaving Louisiana with $1.5 billion in uninsured losses. Due to the labor shortage needed to make needed repairs, Louisiana has developed a framework that places emphasis on rebuilding the healthcare system as a highest priority to attract people back to New Orleans in order to facilitate its recovery. State, local and federal governments all have important roles to play in the recovery process. At the state and local levels, commissions to plan for the future health care system have been established. The Mayor of New Orleans' recommended the shift towards: ambulatory care, wellness and preventive medicine, health promotion, chronic disease prevention and away from institutional care; maintain a University teaching hospital in New Orleans; and build capacity for electronic medical records. Task force Approach. Since it was difficult for the commission to do effective planning without reliable information on the population and what segments of the population will return. The Louisiana Recovery Authority established by the Governor, included one task force dedicated to health care issues at the federal level, the Department of Health and Human Services has been supporting the role under the National Response Plan for long-term community recovery and mitigation to enable community recovery from the long-term consequences of a large-scale incident. Also non-profit making bodies like the Red Cross, Oxfam, and Catholic Relief Services, philanthropic and the business world at large are putting in concerted efforts in stretching an olive branch to rescue the Healthcare system. 6Elsewhere, the federal government is working on a plan to make electronic health records available to first responders for use in emergency situations or disasters. The Southern Governors' Association has convened healthcare providers, payers, consumers, business leaders and IT professionals to serve on the Gulf Coast Health Information Task Force. The group, which received a federal grant to promote the use of EHRs in the Gulf Coast, will review the necessary standards and policies to support a regional health information organization that would help digitize medical records. Health Policy Approach. Health Policy Responses to Hurricane Katrina triggered building of more decentralized system of community clinics and smaller hospitals gradually as residents return and neighborhoods are rebuilt. Such system would be more flexible and responsive to the health care needs of low-income residents, and care might be more accessible in community-based clinics. Ideally, an expanded program of public insurance would complement such a system for uninsured adults. Broadening public health insurance coverage is a politically feasible consideration, using federal funds to reimburse community clinics and small hospitals for uncompensated care, rather than relying on a single public hospital. Through Workshops: The agency's Centers for Public Health Preparedness (CPHP) are working to strengthen terrorism and emergency preparedness by linking academic expertise to state and local health agency needs. Within the program, colleges and universities are providing preparedness education, to public health workers, health care providers, students, and others. Currently, 52 CPHPs have been established at schools and colleges of public health, medicine, nursing, veterinary medicine, pharmacy, biological sciences, in a community college, and in several university-based medical and health science centers. CPHPs also work in close collaboration with state and local health agencies to develop, deliver, and evaluate preparedness education based on community need. Collaborations Strategies: At each stage of rebuilding strategies, to bring all essential services back online, there has to be a correlation between emerging forms of social support and access to opportunity. Tulane University is pursuing this coordinated strategy in preparing to reopen for the spring 2006 semester, including temporary housing for students, faculty, and staff whose pre-Katrina housing is uninhabitable, shuttle buses are in place linking temporary houses with the campus, a school for the children of returning employees, and teachers to staff the school. Other employers hoping to attract workers back to restart business in New Orleans are not big enough to do the same on their own. Instead they are collaborating with "matchmakers" publicly funded agencies-to help link the staging of jobs and housing to that of schools, health care, clean water and child care. The information sharing and negotiation necessary to make such partnerships work will not happen unless it is someone's job to make them happen. Such a network of information providers could help ensure that information flows in the opposite direction as well, giving the former residents of New Orleans- including those who lack money and political connections an effective voice in decisions about how their city is rebuilt. Conclusion. Approximately 10 months after Hurricane Katrina landed on New Orleans on the 29, 2005 and the subsequent flooding that resulted into the largest natural disasters to hit the U.S in 100 years. The devastation shattered people's lives and the aftermath leaves a unique experience to urban planners and Policymakers. The cloud of uncertainty that hangs on the people's mind is how to bring the puzzle back in shape. New Orleans is dealing with these public health challenges by overcoming the inertia of Post-Traumatic Stress disorders and embarking on a synchronized aspect in rebuilding demolished infruscture that are resistant to future environmental anomalies, through a coordinated public sector leadership, new partnerships with businesses, nonprofits and philanthropies and money. However much efforts need to be put on engineering of communication gadgets that could alert the people about the looming catastrophic spell. References: Bring New Orleans Back Commission. 2006. Plan for New Orleans: The New American City. New Orleans, LA: Bring New Orleans Back Commission. Bill, Walsh (2006). "White House Against Baker Bailout Bill." 8 Environmental Health Perspectives, Accessed 06/10/2006 "In Katrina's Wake" free online publication from National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences" Volume 114. URL http://www.ehponline.org/members/2006/114-1/focus.html Hatry, Harry. (1999) Performance Measurement. Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press. Jordan, Lara Jakes. (2006) "No New Katrina Aid in Bush Budget." Washington Post, February 6. Logan, John. R. (2006) The Impact of Katrina: Race and Class in Storm-Damaged Neighborhoods. Whispering Wind (2005) "Louisiana's United Houma Nation seeking assistance in wake of Katrina." Read More