Cardiologist Dr. Tiffany Di Pietro describes how Florida hospitals handle hurricanes: lockdown protocols, medication shortages, and a surge of heart patients worsened by high-salt emergency foods. Four C-17 aircraft brought 300 federal medical personnel to help after Irma.
Thank you so much. Have a good day. Bye-bye.
People in Florida are dealing with the immediate stress and trauma of Hurricane Irma, but once the storm is gone, there are serious health issues to talk about that many people suffer from. Florida medical staff all over the state will have a huge hand in helping those people. Look at this, the Air Force loaded up 4 C-17 aircraft with 300 doctors, nurses, and other healthcare personnel heading to Florida to help in the disaster. They're members of the National Disaster Medical System. Joining us now is board-certified cardiologist, preventive health expert, Dr. Tiffany Di Pietro. How will this kind of manpower help what people are facing after the storm? It's a big help.
What happens in our hospitals when a hurricane's coming is the hospitals go on lockdown once tropical storm-force winds kick in because then fire rescue is not able, they basically go on lockdown as well and they're not able to get to people. So what we do is we put our hospitals on lockdown. We have an A team and a B team. A team is the hurricane team, B team is post-hurricane team. So what inevitably happens is you have patients with acute issues that need to get out and get help because our hospitals are completely, basically flooded down with patients already. And then you have patients who have chronic medical conditions which potentially get worse during the hurricane. Maybe they couldn't get their medications refilled. The med— the— there's no real fresh food. You're eating preserved foods which are full of salt. So patients with heart failure go into worse heart failure. So we run into a lot of issues really more so after the hurricane than even during the hurricane.
Really quickly, because one of the issues I experienced with loved ones and relatives in South Florida They had to stay in their condo in South Beach because one of the individuals has Alzheimer's disease. So you get into this tricky situation of where it would have been worse if they had tried to move her into a shelter because she wouldn't be able to get back, and it's the trauma of moving her.
There's a lot of anxiety, a lot of stress. We all know that, that kind of precedes a lot of other medical issues as well, especially heart conditions. Not only that, patients that have Alzheimer's, who have bad anxiety, who are older, we like to keep them in their own surroundings. When you move those patients out of their known surroundings, they get worse. So it's a, it's a catch-22 on what we should do with certain patients with certain conditions. And they were lucky. Dr. Sizemore, thank you so much for being here. We'll see you very soon. Dr. Tiffany Di Pietro marking 16
