Sandy highlights nursing home evacuation troubles

NEW YORK (AP) — In Superstorm Sandy’s wake, health experts and regulators are warning that thousands of nursing homes nationwide are still ill-prepared for a natural disaster.

The late October storm was the latest in a string of disasters to reveal gaps in emergency planning, despite an industry-wide effort to improve preparedness in the years since Hurricane Katrina.

Even in New York City, where disaster readiness has been a way of life since 9/11, seaside nursing homes and assisted living centers struggled to evacuate 6,300 residents from their flooded or powerless buildings in the days after the storm.

Some changes could be in the works. The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said it expects to issue new disaster planning requirements for nursing homes this year, with an aim toward avoiding the types of problems seen in Sandy.

“They seem to do quite well with food, water, transportation, but once you get beyond that, they aren’t so great,” said University of Pittsburgh researcher Nicholas Castle, who published a study of more than 2,000 nursing home evacuation plans in 2008.

In New York, there was confusion at many homes about where patients should be sent. Some sat for hours aboard unmoving ambulances as the drivers waited for orders, only to be taken to the wrong place. Some facilities accepting evacuees wound up overloaded with more patients than they were prepared to handle. With the phones knocked out, relatives struggled to learn where loved ones had been taken. Medical records that were supposed to accompany displaced residents never arrived.