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Editor's
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Courage. Clinical competence. Creativity. Commitment. Stamina. Compassion. All were demonstrated time and again by nurses and other health care professionals during the last two weeks as Tropical Storm Allison significantly altered the delivery of health care in Houston and affected communities in East Texas and Louisiana. Rarely has a major city’s health care system been as decimated as Houston’s was by Allison. Depositing up to 26 inches of rain in 24 hours in some parts of the city, Allison’s floodwaters severely crippled Houston’s ability to care for the sick. The Texas Medical Center—with tertiary and specialty hospitals that contain more than 6,000 licensed beds and that are staffed by more than 55,000 employees and almost 20,000 health care students—suffered significant damage. In the early morning hours of June 9, many hospitals in the Texas Medical Center and throughout Houston went dark. Some stayed that way. In addition, many hospitals lost both their freshwater supply and their telephone systems. A week later, one of the city’s two Level I trauma center hospitals remains closed for major repairs and several other large hospitals still are operating on backup power. Cardiac diagnostic laboratories, pharmacies, kitchens, MRIs and major research facilities in the Texas Medical Center have been wiped out by the floodwaters. It will take months to repair the facilities and years to redo the research. But nurse heroes have been plentiful in Houston. When the lights went out and the backup generators failed, nurses bagged ventilator patients by hand, for hours in some cases. Nurses not already at the hospitals found ways around and across the high waters to get to their colleagues and their patients. When the need to evacuate hundreds of patients became clear, nurses got the job done, often carrying stretchers down many flights of stairs and sometimes through water. Nurses went with their evacuated patients and cared for them in other hospitals. Emergency center nurses whose hospitals had to close their ERs staffed emergency centers in other hospitals as the community’s need for emergency services escalated while the capacity was severely diminished. Flight nurses spent hours evacuating patients from the hospital rather than bringing in trauma patients. A week later, these nurses continue to work wherever they are needed and often show up with their own food and water, and walk through darkened corridors to get to their units. Courage? You bet. It’s darn scary in a hospital when the lights go out and the backup generators don’t kick in for hours, if ever. Clinical competency? In abundance. Making decisions with lots of information from equipment requires critical thinking. Making decisions with only the information you can gather without the technology requires absolute clinical competence. Creativity? Most definitely. While the disaster plans helped, creativity and ingenuity were the keys to success as more and more barriers to implementing the disaster plans occurred. Commitment? No doubt. Many nurses, isolated in their hospitals without power or phones, took care of their patients without knowing whether their own homes or cars were under water. Others found ways to get to their hospitals regardless of the dangers. Stamina? Like athletes. Most nurses who came to work Friday evening didn’t leave until well into Saturday night. Some grabbed a few hours of sleep at the hospital and worked through Sunday, too. Compassion? Yes—for the patients, families and each other. In virtually every picture shown on television from a health care facility, nurses could be seen comforting someone. Much was accomplished and much was learned as a result of Tropical Storm Allison. Those nurses who demonstrated their courage, clinical competence, creativity, commitment, stamina and compassion make us proud to be their colleagues in the nursing profession.
What
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NEWS
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