These days, if a patient is in trouble, it is not likely that one doctor will save him. Medicine has become a Team Sport. Wise doctors consult with other doctors, and when a patient is hospitalized they listen to the nurses who may well have seen and heard things that the doctor needs to know.

In an emergency, both nurses and physicians need to be able to collaborate with many other professionals, both inside and outside of the hospital. The tale below, which was originally published in Pulse-voices from the heart of medicine illustrates how when residents, nurses, paramedics, EMTs and an attending physicians at another hospitals work together,  lives can be saved..

In this remarkable story, no one pulls rank on anyone else. Hospitals don’t compete: they help each other. A disaster seems to have brought out the best in everyone.  Ideally, health care reform will mean that in the future care that is patient-centered—not hospital-centered or doctor-centered—will become the rule, and not the exception.

Let me add that what Lois Isaksen says about Bellevue is true—it is “the Statue of Liberty of hospitals—give me your tired, your poor, your weak, your uninsured.”

After the Flood: Remembering Sandy

By Lois Isaksen

We’d just received word: within hours, Hurricane Sandy would hit New York City. As an emergency-medicine resident at NYU/Bellevue Hospital Center, I was working as fast as I could–examining patients, suturing wounds, setting bones, running families to the hospital pharmacy before it closed.

The lights flickered once, but I did not take it as the omen it was.

~~~~

Hours after the storm had struck and the lights had gone out, I wandered about in the dark, searching by my cell-phone light for a cane.

The cane was for our cranky, homeless patient Bruce, the last to be discharged. He refused to stay anywhere but here, because he did not trust other doctors. He loved us, cursed us and threw things at us, all at the same time.

Meanwhile, my colleagues kept making “field trips” to the stairwell to check the water level. The flood was rising up the basement stairs, brackish and filled with floating debris.

Bellevue underwater? Impossible!

Bellevue is the country’s oldest public hospital. It is the Statue of Liberty of hospitals–“give me your tired, your poor, your weak, your uninsured…”  Bellevue has never closed its doors on anyone.

But the rising floodwaters had changed all that.

After Bruce got his cane, we received word that the ICU patients, on the tenth floor, were running out of time, power and oxygen reserves. With the elevators down, they would all have to be carried out and transferred elsewhere.
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