Observations from the emergency management of dialysis patients evacuated from the US Virgin Islands to Puerto Rico following hurricane Irma

Two category 5 hurricanes, Irma and Maria, arrived in the Caribbean in September 2017 in rapid succession. On September 6, Irma devastated the islands of St. Thomas and St. John, in the Virgin Islands of the United States (USVI). Most medical infrastructure was damaged, including hemodialysis facili...

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Autores principales: Avilés Mendoza, Guillermo J., Finne, Kristen P., Torre Leon, Francisco, Burke, Lisandro Montalvo, Cabrera-Marquez, Jessica, Mercado Casillas, Ana M., Malave, Grasiela, Brown, Christopher, Kelman, Jeffrey, Kopp, Jeffrey B.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8593631/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34784905
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-021-07194-6
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author Avilés Mendoza, Guillermo J.
Finne, Kristen P.
Torre Leon, Francisco
Burke, Lisandro Montalvo
Cabrera-Marquez, Jessica
Mercado Casillas, Ana M.
Malave, Grasiela
Brown, Christopher
Kelman, Jeffrey
Kopp, Jeffrey B.
author_facet Avilés Mendoza, Guillermo J.
Finne, Kristen P.
Torre Leon, Francisco
Burke, Lisandro Montalvo
Cabrera-Marquez, Jessica
Mercado Casillas, Ana M.
Malave, Grasiela
Brown, Christopher
Kelman, Jeffrey
Kopp, Jeffrey B.
author_sort Avilés Mendoza, Guillermo J.
collection PubMed
description Two category 5 hurricanes, Irma and Maria, arrived in the Caribbean in September 2017 in rapid succession. On September 6, Irma devastated the islands of St. Thomas and St. John, in the Virgin Islands of the United States (USVI). Most medical infrastructure was damaged, including hemodialysis facilities, paralyzing dialysis operations. After Irma’s landfall, Puerto Rico served as a safehaven for thousands of displaced and repatriated persons from the impacted islands. These included a cohort of 129 hemodialysis patients evacuated from St. Thomas, USVI to San Juan, Puerto Rico from September 9−11, 2017. The hemodialysis patients arrived first at hotels in San Juan and were then transferred to a Special Needs Shelter, run by the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and located in the Puerto Rico Convention Center. With the imminent arrival of Hurricane Maria, most patients were evacuated on September 19 to a special needs shelter on the campus of the Florida International University, in Miami, Florida. While in San Juan, hemodialysis treatments were provided by local nephrologists working with local hemodialysis centers. Here, we describe the challenges and the emergency management actions taken to ensure continuity of care, including providing dialysis, general medical care, shelter, food and transportation for USVI dialysis patients during their stay in San Juan, Puerto Rico. We describe here the experiences of federal and host state/territorial officials in the special needs shelter, in the context of the state/territorial and federal response to disasters, in order to provide ideas about challenges, solutions, and approaches to coordinating care for dialysis patients evacuated from a disaster.
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spelling pubmed-85936312021-11-16 Observations from the emergency management of dialysis patients evacuated from the US Virgin Islands to Puerto Rico following hurricane Irma Avilés Mendoza, Guillermo J. Finne, Kristen P. Torre Leon, Francisco Burke, Lisandro Montalvo Cabrera-Marquez, Jessica Mercado Casillas, Ana M. Malave, Grasiela Brown, Christopher Kelman, Jeffrey Kopp, Jeffrey B. BMC Health Serv Res Correspondence Two category 5 hurricanes, Irma and Maria, arrived in the Caribbean in September 2017 in rapid succession. On September 6, Irma devastated the islands of St. Thomas and St. John, in the Virgin Islands of the United States (USVI). Most medical infrastructure was damaged, including hemodialysis facilities, paralyzing dialysis operations. After Irma’s landfall, Puerto Rico served as a safehaven for thousands of displaced and repatriated persons from the impacted islands. These included a cohort of 129 hemodialysis patients evacuated from St. Thomas, USVI to San Juan, Puerto Rico from September 9−11, 2017. The hemodialysis patients arrived first at hotels in San Juan and were then transferred to a Special Needs Shelter, run by the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and located in the Puerto Rico Convention Center. With the imminent arrival of Hurricane Maria, most patients were evacuated on September 19 to a special needs shelter on the campus of the Florida International University, in Miami, Florida. While in San Juan, hemodialysis treatments were provided by local nephrologists working with local hemodialysis centers. Here, we describe the challenges and the emergency management actions taken to ensure continuity of care, including providing dialysis, general medical care, shelter, food and transportation for USVI dialysis patients during their stay in San Juan, Puerto Rico. We describe here the experiences of federal and host state/territorial officials in the special needs shelter, in the context of the state/territorial and federal response to disasters, in order to provide ideas about challenges, solutions, and approaches to coordinating care for dialysis patients evacuated from a disaster. BioMed Central 2021-11-16 /pmc/articles/PMC8593631/ /pubmed/34784905 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-021-07194-6 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Correspondence
Avilés Mendoza, Guillermo J.
Finne, Kristen P.
Torre Leon, Francisco
Burke, Lisandro Montalvo
Cabrera-Marquez, Jessica
Mercado Casillas, Ana M.
Malave, Grasiela
Brown, Christopher
Kelman, Jeffrey
Kopp, Jeffrey B.
Observations from the emergency management of dialysis patients evacuated from the US Virgin Islands to Puerto Rico following hurricane Irma
title Observations from the emergency management of dialysis patients evacuated from the US Virgin Islands to Puerto Rico following hurricane Irma
title_full Observations from the emergency management of dialysis patients evacuated from the US Virgin Islands to Puerto Rico following hurricane Irma
title_fullStr Observations from the emergency management of dialysis patients evacuated from the US Virgin Islands to Puerto Rico following hurricane Irma
title_full_unstemmed Observations from the emergency management of dialysis patients evacuated from the US Virgin Islands to Puerto Rico following hurricane Irma
title_short Observations from the emergency management of dialysis patients evacuated from the US Virgin Islands to Puerto Rico following hurricane Irma
title_sort observations from the emergency management of dialysis patients evacuated from the us virgin islands to puerto rico following hurricane irma
topic Correspondence
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8593631/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34784905
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-021-07194-6
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