A new study finds a sample of 30 hospitals in four states and the District of Columbia are not prepared to handle mass casualties caused by biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. The research findings, expected to provide insight into how hospital emergency services can better prepare for such incidents, will be released October 15 at the annual conference of the American College of Emergency Physicians in Chicago. The study will be published next month in the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

“The study confirmed what we expected to find-that not one of the hospitals we surveyed felt fully prepared to handle a biological incident and the majority of hospitals felt unprepared for a chemical or a nuclear event,”said emergency physician Janet Williams, MD. Williams is the director of the Center for Rural Emergency Medicine and a key member of the Virtual Medical Campus at West Virginia University in Morgantown, W.Va.

Only one out of 30 hospitals surveyed had stockpiled any medications for a bioterrorism attack, and 26 of the hospitals surveyed reported they could handle only 10 to 50 casualties at once.

With the threat of terrorist attacks and weapons of mass destruction increasing, emergency physicians and health care agencies around the globe are taking efforts to strengthen medical services for mass casualty incidents.

This initial assessment of 30 hospitals found those sampled were ill prepared for weapons of mass destruction incidents particularly in the areas of general awareness among health care professionals, techniques for mass decontamination, mobilizing a mass medical response, health communications, and facility security.

None of the respondents believed their sites were fully prepared to handle a biological incident. About three-fourths believed that their sites were not prepared at all, and only one-fourth of the hospitals (all urban) believed they were somewhat prepared. The reported level of preparedness for nuclear weapons was similar to the biologic and chemical weapons response, with the exception that one respondent, located near a nuclear power plant, believed his/her facility was fully prepared to handle a nuclear incident.

The study also revealed that only 13 percent of the hospitals have mobile decontamination stations that can process 10-15 people at a time, and just over a fourth of the hospitals have incorporated weapons of mass destruction preparedness into their disaster plans.

“It’s evident that hospital personnel keenly recognize a need for training and they told us they’d prefer to be trained on site. Three obstacles to adequate training were identifieda lack of time available for training, a lack of available courses, and a lack of funding required to train large numbers of personnel,”Williams said.

The WVU study was conducted to understand the extent of information and training needed in Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Region III . Williams and her research partners at WVU interviewed 17 emergency department directors and 13 nurse managers at 22 rural and eight urban hospitals11 in West Virginia, 10 in Pennsylvania, five in Maryland, three in Virginia and one in the District of Columbiaas a convenience sample to assess hospital readiness.

The Office of Domestic Preparedness (ODP) in the U. S. Department of Justice funds the study. Additional development work is funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’Office of Emergency Preparedness.

WVU ’s Virtual Medical Campus (VMC) educates, trains and certifies emergency medical technicians, hospital emergency department personnel, fire and law officials, emergency operations and military responders in preparation for disasters and terrorist acts. Its computer network and information system will link physicians and other emergency personnel responding to a terrorist attack to specialists who can immediately help identify what steps should be taken to protect people living and working nearby. The VMC is part of the National Training Center for Homeland Security, a joint program of West Virginia University, Electronic Data Systems and the West Virginia National Guard.