Hospital Hams

Chip, N5RTF, at the MARCO Board of Directors meeting expressed his wish to see hospitals throughout the nation equipped with amateur radio stations for emergency communications. (His experience during Hurricane Katrina may have had just a bit to do with this!)

His comments resulted in the following dialogue on the MARCO listserv:

Mary K. Favaro AE4BX:

Just got back from a long locum tenens, and hardly ever get out on my crummy antennas sans sunspots anyway, but saw the note about the hospitals.

In the mid 90's when I was the Charleston County Emergency Co-ordinator I set up 5 hospitals with ham radios and then we had classes and trained a sizable number of ham operators from the employees. We recommended that interested people mainly from non-critical areas i.e. medical librarians, med records, front office, etc train. But we also got many nurses, maintenance people, and several docs as well. We also found nobody would come back at 7 pm for class, but had a successful group at 2:30-4 pm split from 2 shifts.

We found that the hospital auxiliaries were the places to go for the money. It really doesn't take a lot of $$$ to set up a 2 Meter and antenna. The club provided the labor free and we checked the radios semi-annually.

The problem we hadn't predicted was that many of our licensed cadre of hams never touched a radio from season to season. Very few became functioning hams and stayed up with it. So - o refresher classes and hospital nets in pre-hurricane season were set up. We had a group who would come into the hospital and help anyway. We could set up all five hospitals quickly with one call to the switchboard of the 'main' hospital in the group and then the cascade of predetermined calls would alert all the rest and get them manned.

Two years ago I was involved in the group setting up 10 hospitals on the NC/SC border with their own ham network. They had formed a group primarily to share purchasing and equipment, then got their own ham network. SC only had 2 of the hospitals so NC ran things mostly. They elected to go with 6 Meters, and there ensued over a year delay just getting towers and antennas and disagreements over all of the above. The hospitals provided the money from a common fund. Disadvantage there was that the average helping community ham had 2 M not 6 M. They were up and running last year for the first time, not tested yet with a real emergency but have run some practice sessions on anthrax powder contamination, and a dirty bomb.

Best hospital ham group is in California. I can find a web site if anyone is interested. They have community hams that go in and run intra-hospital as well as inter-hospital stuff for earthquakes and other disasters.

Still here, need to retire again.

====================================================================================

Joe Macera, KG6ECQ:

The group here in Southern California that supplements the intra and interhospital communications for hospitals during internal and external disasters is Hospital Disaster Support Communications System. Their website is http://members.aol.com/emcom4hosp/. The inspiration and leader of this group is April Moell, WA6OPS.