Starting Friday hospitals in San Antonio will be accepting patients from New Orleans and the surrounding area.  Hospitals closer to the disaster are filling rapidly, so all hospital Emergency Depts here in San Antonio will take patients transferred to us and then find appriopriate beds for them in the hospital.

I'm meeting today with hospital administration to start to open up beds now.  We will send current patients home (as safety dictates) or to rehab/skilled nursing facilites in order to open medical and ICU beds in anticipation of receiving LOTS from the area.

Once San Antonio starts to fill,  Austin will open to take the next wave.  We've got work to do, but this is when our disaster planning starts to pay off.  Physicians and hospital staff will be putting many extra hours, but we see it as the least we can do to help out.

Texas Medical Association has called for 60 Emergency Physicians, 50 Hospitalists, 40 General Surgeons, and 30 Intensivists to go to Lousiana and Mississippi to provide on site assistance.

Bump in response to NY Patriot's post.

One more update--

3 C-130s are scheduled to leave NO Friday and arrive at Kelly AFB in San Antonio each carrying 50-75 patients.  We'll have a busy weekend.

8 buses arrived this am at Kelly AFB.  The first C-130 has landed and 2 others as well as a C-17 are en route.

5000 are expected to arrive at Kelly today and tomorrow.  They will be housed at a large hanger, originally built for C-5s.  Protocol states they will first be screened for drugs and weapons, then have a medical eval done by military personnel.  Those who require further eval at a hospital are being sent to different facilities on a rotating basis.  I have seen 12 in the past hour.  These folks are refugees, not hospital transfers.  Those are on the way.

So far, no one has had a real medical issue; I think they just wanted to get the hell out of there.  The difficult part is, what do we do with them if they don't require hospital admission?  We need to be careful with what beds we use in order to ensure that we have room for those who truly need them.  We hear that a system to transport folks back to Kelly is in the works (it's about 8mi from my hospital), but the details haven't been ironed out yet.