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Texas hospitals take Katrina lessons to heartHealth centers say they'll use experience dealing with Rita
 The Texas Medical Center is equipped with huge metal doors to help keep floodwaters out. HEALTH LIBRARYRELATED
SPECIAL REPORTYOUR E-MAIL ALERTS(CNN) -- Hospitals in the path of Hurricane Rita plan to apply lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina's flooding of New Orleans, Texas hospital officials said. Most of Houston's 72 hospitals -- with some 16,000 beds -- were planning to stay open, said Amanda Engler, a spokeswoman for the Texas Hospitals Association. "That's a lot of beds," she said in a telephone interview from Austin. "It just would have been such a massive effort" to move the patients out of the hurricane zone. As of Friday morning, only 25 of the hospitals had closed, said Ernie Schmid, a senior policy analyst for the association. Hospitals and their staffs are likely to be needed immediately after the storm passes through, if it lives up to its potential to be catastrophic, Engler said. With two level-one trauma facilities among the city's hospitals, "it's important that they stay operational," she said. In preparation for riding out the storm, hospitals began early this week to stock up with three to four days of food and water and enough diesel fuel to run the generators for several days, Engler said. But getting the diesel fuel has proven problematic, given the "massive exodus" of Houston's residents. John Martinez, a Harris County Hospital District spokesman, said that the generators in the county's hospitals are above ground where they are less likely to short out, as some did in flooded New Orleans hospitals where generators were in basements. Efforts have been made to reduce the number of patients in hospitals, he said. "People who can go home have been sent home." Staff members and their families are planning to bunk in the hospitals to be ready after the storm passes, Martinez said. "We're gearing up for the aftermath," he said. Staffers' pets also are welcome, Martinez said, as long as they are in containers. In Beaumont, also a potential target of Rita, health officials were focused Thursday on evacuating more than 700 patients from the two hospitals, a rehabilitation center and a long-term care facility in the city, Engler said. "It potentially could be very devastating for that area," she said. Stress risingFinding transportation to move the patients has proven difficult. "Every ambulance in the state and then some is tied up right now," she said. "We're trying to get some cargo planes." But, with the storm approaching, stress was rising: "We need to get those patients out of there," she said. Those evacuated from hospitals in the potential strike zone are being sent to hospitals in other areas of the state, said Engler, who has been working in health care in Texas since 1988. "We've never seen anything on this scale, ever," she said. In Corpus Christi, hospitals have asked staff to remain and are "in shelter-in-place mode," she said. Security is another lesson learned from Katrina's August 29 strike, after which looters broke into pharmacies. On a conference call among hospitals planning for the storm, one speaker warned, "If you're an evacuating hospital, lock up your narcotics," Engler said. Keep track of patients' recordsAnother lesson learned from Katrina is to ensure hospital administrators track where their patients are sent, she said. In the exodus of Louisiana patients to Texas, "nobody was documenting" where the patients went, Engler said. "They were showing up at our hospital with no documentation, no medical records. Families couldn't find their loved ones for literally weeks." In some cases, she said, they still have not found them. Now, hospitals have been told to keep a list of the names, birth dates and presumed destinations of patients being evacuated, Engler said. At the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, "They were writing patients' names on their hospital gowns and legs and arms to make sure that, wherever this patient went, someone knew who this patient was." Another incentive for hospitals to keep track of where their patients are sent is that, by doing so, they can ensure they are reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, she said. 
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