Hospital executives attending an emergency preparedness conference on Tuesday were not encouraging about their institutions’ ability to handle an avian flu pandemic, reports Reuters. In response to HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt’s admonition that hospitals should be stockpiling ventilators instead of spending money on remodeling, a disaster expert from Stanford University Medical Center said the hospital didn’t have the staff to run extra ventilators and that it was already operating at capacity. A Johns Hopkins physician said his hospital and medical school had already spent $10 million preparing for an emergency, but that “This is not a sustainable business plan.” A physician from MD Anderson Cancer Center agreed, saying, “There are none of us who can afford to absorb those kinds of costs.” The reality, the article quoted a Cleveland Clinic physician as saying, is that hospitals will give the sickest patients morphine and allow them to die comfortably in a corner. “If the federal government doesn’t help run this, it really isn’t going to go well,” he said.
