Emergency Preparedness

About Emergency Preparedness

It’s time to change the way California thinks about disaster response. The state must draw on the lessons of COVID-19 to prepare differently for disasters, so that the next large crisis will be less severe and less deadly.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that hospitals can quickly mobilize to put in place emergency preparedness plans and use flexible approaches to care for patients with the greatest needs during a disaster. In the case of COVID-19, hospitals rapidly converted spaces to create more ICU beds to care for surges of COVID-19 patients, redeployed staff, and utilized other staffing strategies to provide care to critically ill patients.
Given California’s size and complexity, the health care disaster response system of the future must be nimble enough to respond at any given moment to a regional catastrophe or something larger.