Mobile hospital ready for disasters

The first decade of the 21st century has been one defined by disasters -- from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the current threat of a global flu pandemic.

Yet out of it has come innovations, one of which is a prototype for a mobile hospital that includes a two-bed operating room, four-bed intensive-care unit, eight-bed emergency department, digital X-ray and ultrasound and a lab and pharmacy. All of it housed in a 53-foot tractor-trailer that opens up into a 1,000-square-foot emergency room.

The hospital, which includes a second trailer for equipment and supplies and support units for housing, is called Carolinas MED-1.

Monday and Tuesday last week, about 100 medical staff members from the Charlotte-based Carolinas Medical Center parked the hospital in the lot in front of The Citadel Beach House on the Isle of Palms for an annual training event.

The hospital, with a U.S. patent pending, is only one of two in the world and the only one that has been deployed to disasters. The other hospital is owned by Los Angeles County.

Carolinas MED-1 is the brainchild of Dr. Thomas Blackwell, a 1981 graduate of The Citadel, who first came up with the idea in 1999 as a backup unit for the bricks-and-mortar hospital in Charlotte.

When the 9/11 attacks took place, it took on a new life. Blackwell and colleagues expanded the idea to include a more comprehensive medical-care facility.

More importantly, money became available for its construction. The hospital was built in 2004 with a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

"It's been fun," Blackwell said of the process of building an operational mobile hospital from scratch. "It just took off, and (Hurricane) Katrina was our trial by fire. It was ready, and we had trained on it. Still, it was scary."

Within a week of the storm, Carolinas MED-1 pulled into a parking lot of a Kmart in the Waveland-Bay St. Louis area of western Mississippi, an area where 90 percent of the structures had been leveled from the 30-foot storm surge. Also in the parking lot were 150 refugee families who had lost virtually everything.

Over seven weeks in September and October 2005, the hospital treated 7,000 patients with medical problems that included heart attacks, burns, broken bones, serious infections and dehydration among other complaints. The staff and hospital were called back to the New Orleans area in February 2006 for Mardi Gras because the area had only 1,800 of its 5,300 hospital beds available during the celebration.

The next disaster came in summer 2008 with the flooding in Columbus, Ind., where 2,300 patients were treated. One was in respiratory failure and could have died had it not been for the mobile hospital.

Other possible uses, according to Carolinas MED-1 spokesman Scott White, could include a pandemic involving the H1N1 or other flu virus.

"Isolating masses of patients in a facility like a convention center, arena or even large gymnasium is very likely," said White. "Rather than hospitalizing these highly contagious people and risking noninfected patients ... stationing a MED-1 unit could provide intensive care, acute emergency care or surgical care."

This is the third consecutive year that the Charlotte-based staff has traveled to the Isle of Palms to do its training, in part because The Citadel has offered its facility. Scott says they think it's important to do training away from the Queen City.

"To bring it here and to be close to the water helps put us in the right mind-set for training," said Scott.

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