Hospital Resources and Patient Load

LAEMSA polled hospitals throughout the Los Angeles Basin with a basic emergency department permit every six hours Thursday through Friday. Each provided the number of available critic non-critical beds. "We had an average of 259 critical beds and 815 non-critical beds available throughout the event. County operated hospitals had an average of 11 critical beds and 29 non-critical beds available" (Chaffin, 1992). Additional beds would have been available from Veterans and hospitals and other hospitals with standby emergency department permits if needed. Staff at the LAEMSA EOC never felt that county needs exceeded available resources. The ratio of emergency department visits to available hospital beds for all LAEMSA reported casualties gives a very rough idea of the stress placed on hospitals located close to the South Central Los Angeles disaster (Table 22). (It is a very gross measure that ignores occupancy and other capacity factors at the time of the disaster.) Clearly, Saint Francis Medical Center was the most stressed, followed by Martin Luther King, California Medical Center, and Daniel Freeman. Potentially, these hospitals had the fewest available beds to admit seriously injured patients. It appears that Harbor UCLA Medical Center, and USC Medical Center might have been able to take more patients. At one point, USC requested more patients from the LAEMS EOC. Additional patients were forthcoming but the hospital never reached capacity. Five of the twenty-six hospitals are designated trauma centers. Three others had been trauma centers, retaining much of their emergency department capability to care for severely injured patients. Five of top six hospitals (excluding Saint Francis) that received the most patients had been trauma centers.

Medical Care for the Injured

Continue to Hospital Alerting and Internal Disaster Management

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