Background: Situated in coastal Florida, the four hospitals/1,000 beds in the Health First Integrated delivery network are located right in hurricane alley. Our hospitalist program had to plan for, communicate, and execute our hurricane staffing and disaster plan twice in one year. Purpose: Lessons learned from the implementation of our Hospitalist staffing and disaster plan [...]

Background: In April 2020, New York was the global epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. With as many as 12,000 new COVID-19 cases reported each day, many hospital beds and intensive care units were at capacity. As a part of Operation Gotham, the US Army Corps of Engineers transformed the Jacob K Javits Center in Manhattan [...]

Background: Hospital disaster response has historically been the purview of emergency medicine and surgery, without significant involvement of hospitalists themselves or consideration of how mass casualty incidents impact the hospital as a whole. However, many disaster modalities, e.g. pandemic infectious disease or bioterrorism, are outside of the surgical scope of practice and require involvement of [...]

Case Presentation: A 61 year old female with Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (COPD) on inhaled steroids underwent left lower lobectomy for Stage 1 Lung Adenocarcinoma in August 2017. While recovering, her house was flooded by Hurricane Harvey, in Houston, Texas. She was directly exposed to flood waters and subsequently lived with mold in her home. [...]