Third Hopkins Group to Leave for Gulf Relief Efforts

Johns Hopkins Medicine
Office of Corporate Communications
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September 5, 2005

DEPARTURE DELAYED FOR THIRD HOPKINS GROUP LEAVING FOR GULF

Departure of a third Hopkins group for Gulf medical relief efforts has been delayed by 24 hours, from Tuesday morning to Wednesday morning, to allow more time for a field hospital to be set up.

Johns Hopkins Medicine planned to send a third group to the Gulf on Tuesday to provide medical relief at the request of the federal government. The new group will join a team being assembled by the National Institutes of Health at a military installation in Meridian MS, about 50 miles north of New Orleans.  Medical staff from the NIH Clinical Center and from Duke also will be part of the NIH team.  The request to Hopkins came directly from NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, M.D., to Gabor Kelen, M.D., director of Hopkins' Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response (CEPAR) and of its Department of Emergency Medicine.

The Hopkins group was to meet at the Houck Lobby of The Johns Hopkins Hospital's Phipps Building at 6 a.m. for briefings, immunizations -- and breakfast, leave by bus at 8 a.m. to go to the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda for additional briefings with the rest of the NIH team, and from there go to Reagan National for a chartered plane flight to Mississippi at about 1 p.m.  (It is expected that the schedule will remain the same on Wednesday.) Hopkins has been informed that the NIH is setting up several facilities there, with power, food, potable water, and security. All members from Hopkins will be "federalized", and thus medical liability and worker's comp will be covered under federal laws.
 
A team of three Johns Hopkins physicians and nine nurses flew from Martin Airport to Louisiana early Monday morning to join in a state-to-state relief mission to aid beleaguered medical personnel in the hurricane-battered Gulf Coast region.  That team of physicians from The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, as well as nurses from the Hopkins Hospital, Bayview, Howard County General Hospital and Johns Hopkins Home Care Group, will provide relief to exhausted staff at West Jefferson Medical Center, a 462-bed community hospital in Marrero, La., near New Orleans.  Hopkins Medicine deployed the team in response to a request for assistance from the Maryland Department of Health and Human Services to answer Louisiana's call for help.

Other Johns Hopkins medical experts already are leading two American Red Cross medical needs assessment teams that left Friday for the Gulf Coast area. They are determining the number of emergency medical facilities the Red Cross needs to establish there and what health care resources will be required to meet the crisis unfolding in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

The Hopkins efforts are being coordinated by CEPAR. More than 500 staff members from all parts of Johns Hopkins Medicine answered the call for volunteers that went out last week.  Out of the 500, CEPAR has assembled a potential team of 109 to answer the call from NIH.  The exact number and composition of the final team has not yet been determined.