Legal Considerations for Health Care Practitioners After Superstorm Sandy

Abstract

During disaster response and recovery, legal issues often arise related to the provision of health care services to affected residents. Superstorm Sandy led to the evacuation of many hospitals and other health care facilities and compromised the ability of health care practitioners to provide necessary primary care. This article highlights the challenges and legal concerns faced by health care practitioners in the aftermath of Sandy, which included limitations in scope of practice, difficulties with credentialing, lack of portability of practitioner licenses, and concerns regarding volunteer immunity and liability. Governmental and nongovernmental entities employed various strategies to address these concerns; however, legal barriers remained that posed challenges throughout the Superstorm Sandy response and recovery period. We suggest future approaches to address these legal considerations, including policies and legislation, additional waivers of law, and planning and coordination among multiple levels of governmental and nongovernmental organizations. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2016;10:518-524).

Development and Psychometric Properties of Decision-Making Scale for Emergency Hospital Evacuation in Disasters

“…55 Hershy emphasized that EHE-related legal challenges are the main concerns of hospital managers. 56 Furthermore, EHE prerequisites affect the required time estimation. The number of ambulances, number of personnel needed, equipment required for patient transportation, the hospital's internal and external communication system, capacity of the destination hospital, and patients' evacuation routes are chief among the issues faced.…”

Decision-making on Hospital Emergency Evacuation in Disasters and Emergencies: Findings From a Systematic Review

“…Conducting the emergency evacuation following a disaster requires fast and correct decisions (61). The present systematic review suggests improving the quality of decisions, and effective measures to achieve this are as follow: having previous experience of disaster, (30) increasing knowledge of management, (50, 57) encouraging group decision-making in emergency evacuation, (62) and being equipped with the supportive systems of decision-making (22) when the legal aspects of emergency evacuation decision-making is concerned (27,51).…”

Telehealth in emergency medicine: A consensus conference to map the intersection of telehealth and emergency medicine

“…Evidence is also limited in more resource-limited and disaster settings. Published literature describes operational models for disaster and humanitarian response, [132][133][134][135][136][137] barriers to implementation and use, current and potential uses of telehealth applications in acute and recovery phases, and feasibility of novel technologies (e.g., robots, drones). [138][139][140] Future studies should identify potential points of system failure, quantify reliability of system performance to optimize implementation of systems with infrequent but high-stakes use, and evaluate patient-and population-level health outcomes.…”