HCA Healthcare Prepares for Hurricane Irma

The 2017 Hurricane Season is turning out to be an unusually active one, with three hurricanes currently in the Atlantic. Hurricane Irma, which is expected to make landfall this weekend in Florida, poses an immediate threat, and we at HCA Healthcare are helping to ensure our patients, hospitals and people are prepared.

Building on the experience with Hurricane Harvey and the flooding in Houston, HCA Healthcare’s enterprise emergency operations center in Nashville, a multi-disciplinary incident response team of more than 200 people, is providing support to affiliate hospitals in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. Those preparations include providing additional food, water, medication, generators, security and staffing to help ensure their ability to continue to care for patients during and after the storm.

Additionally, HCA Healthcare’s emergency operations centers at the corporate office and in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina continue round-the-clock operations and are coordinating support to our facilities. We continue to monitor the storm’s track and communicate with local and state emergency planning organizations, as well as our emergency preparedness team in Nashville to ensure HCA Healthcare-affiliate hospitals have the support they need.

We also continue to support our colleagues in Houston and Corpus Christi as they recover from the unprecedented effects of Hurricane Harvey. Three mobile employee resource centers are in the affected area providing access to relief aid from the HCA Healthcare Hope Fund, the company’s employee assistance nonprofit organization, temporary lodging, transportation discounts, and counseling. To date the Hope Fund has helped more than 1,000 members of the HCA Healthcare family with grants of approximately $1.1 million. We are also providing relief staffing for our facilities and beginning the remediation process for those that were damaged.

In the coming days, we will continue to be challenged with the ramifications of these storms. HCA Healthcare stands ready and committed to our patients and our people to help us through the difficult days ahead.