Lessons From Chennai: Hospitals Unprepared for Natural Disasters

Chennai hospitals, both public and private, were woefully unprepared to deal with casualties during the recent floods in the city, according to an op-ed in The Hindu. The last time the topic of better preparedness was debated was in 2011, after the basement of the Advanced Medical Research Institute (AMRI) in Calcutta caught fire and 90 patients choked to death.

A few months before the AMRI tragedy, Kavita Narayan, a disaster management expert trained by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), along with some of the best minds in the country — structural engineers, doctors and specialists in hospital design — had written a policy document that laid out in great detail what was expected of medical and non-medical staff in case of any disaster.Every single one of the 111 pages of Hospital Standards Safety Committee had answers that could have saved lives. The document had exhaustive instructions to doctors, nurses, and management about how to plan and evacuate in case of emergency. 

Article in The Hindu

As Chennai returns to normalcy, it is perhaps finally time that such measures are taken across India, before the next disaster is upon us.