Israeli experts in emergency preparedness offer help

With its experience of war and terrorism, sadly, few nations’ health-care systems have more experience treating mass-casualty events than does Israel. Happily, though, Israeli hospitals are eager to share that expertise with their colleagues in the United States.

It was to promote that exchange of information and ideas that brought Judith Jochnowitz from the Western Galilee Hospital in Nahariya to the Kansas City area this week. Jochnowitz spoke to members of the public and to hospital personnel in Overland Park Wednesday as part of a multi-stop national speaking tour.

Jochnowitz, who was born in Pennsylvania and made aliyah in 1975, became a hospital employee in 1997 and has worked to build relationships between WGH and its counterparts in the United States ever since.

The Western Galilee region is linked via the Jewish Agency’s “Partnership 2000” program to 16 different cities in the central United States — from Akron, Ohio, to San Antonio, Texas. And it was as part of Partnership 2000 that WGH established its first “Emergency Response Group” training course, in which American physicians, nurses and hospital administrators travel to Israel to see how their peers prepare for mass-casualty emergencies. The participants earn continuing-education credits and wedge two days of sightseeing into the weeklong program. The next one begins Oct. 29.

‘As the Katyusha flies’
While the Americans can and have learned a great deal from the exchange program, it’s unlikely that any American hospital will implement emergency-preparedness measures on a scale that WGH — which sits just six miles south of the Lebanese border “as the Katyusha flies,” Jochnowitz said — has.

WGH has 700 beds above ground, plus a 450-bed underground facility that sits empty most of the time, but which was employed during the Second Lebanon War of 2006, when Hezbollah forces crossed the border to attack Israeli soldiers and kidnapped some of them.

“We were targeted from the very first morning of the war,” Jochnowitz said. “They improved their aim, and on the 16th day of the war, a Katyusha rocket flew in a fourth-floor window in the ophthalmology department and exploded, causing extensive damage.

“Luckily, no one was injured because of our emergency preparedness. On the first night of the war, we moved 225 patients to the underground facility — those on the north side of the building whose rooms were exposed, or those totally bed-ridden, like maternity patients just before or after birth. Those who couldn’t fend for themselves.”

Jochnowitz said Israelis realize it’s not necessary for every hospital to take such precautions.

“It’s not necessary to bury millions of dollars worth of equipment underground,” Jochnowitz said. “There are inexpensive things you can do, too, like installing colored lines on the floor and using color-coded instruction sheets in every department.”

In addition, Jochnowitz said, exchange-program participants have found that “American hospitals are not accustomed to drilling, which we feel is a very important part of emergency preparedness. So we teach them how we do it.”

Jochnowitz said two of WGH’s physicians — eye surgeon Dr. Zvi Sheleg and the head of its trauma unit, Dr. Guy Lin — were in Haiti this week as part of a team of Israelis volunteering to treat the most recent mass-casualty event to galvanize global attention — the Jan. 12 earthquake.

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