via MedPundit, the Government (Motto: "We’re Here to Help") has released some guidance for re-opening shuttered hospitals in the even of a disaster, here.
I spent some time looking these guidelines over, and they look pretty good. This document also points out an incorrect statement I made recently: actually there are empty hospitals waiting for patients. Nearly every major city has one or two closed hospitals sitting empty, but they’re empty of everything: beds, medicines, but mostly the skilled people who make them run.
The guidance gives several hints for who should staff these places, like DMAT’s, which make sense, especially if it’s a local DMAT and the credentialling is already in place. The planners state the best way to handle this would be for the ‘surge capacity’ hospital to be considered a satellite of an existing hospital, which makes sense from an organizational standpoint.
