For Release: IMMEDIATE
Date: December 14, 2006

Delivery under way for eight State Medical Assistance Team portable hospitals

Units expand medical surge capacity

RALEIGH – Delivery began this week on State Medical Assistance Team (SMAT) Type II portable hospital units to eight of the state’s trauma centers.

The $500,000 units will be delivered over the next six months to hospitals in Chapel Hill, Charlotte, Durham, Greensboro, Greenville, Raleigh, Wilmington and Winston-Salem. Mission Hospitals in Asheville received the state’s first unit on Wednesday. That unit will serve hospitals and first responders in 17 western North Carolina counties.

The 50-bed units are part of the state’s coordinated response to assure that citizens have access to medical care before, during or after natural or man-made disasters. They will help state, regional and local responders to provide surge capacity for the provision of medical personnel and equipment for triage, treatment, tracking and transport of patients.

“This is another huge step forward for North Carolina’s preparedness by emergency medical services,” said Drexdal Pratt, chief of the N.C. Office of Emergency Medical Services. “It is part of a complex plan developed in the wake of lessons learned from the response to medical needs following hurricanes and tornadoes, as well as those anticipated in the wake of 9/11. The SMAT units and the system and protocols that we have developed have become a model for other states.”

Each trailer is 53-feet long and is deployable within eight hours. Each is staffed by medical teams based out of the state’s eight Regional Advisory Committees. Doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other allied healthcare professionals staff the mobile medical units. Each team includes subspecialties including burns, cardiac, neonatal intensive care and obstetrics.

The other SMAT II trailers will be delivered in early 2007 to UNC Hospitals in Chapel Hill, Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, Duke University Hospital in Durham, Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center/Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital in the Triad, Pitt County Memorial Hospital in Greenville, WakeMed in Raleigh, and New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington. The last unit is to be delivered in May 2007.

The Asheville unit is staffed by personnel from the Mountain Area Trauma Regional Advisory Committee. The units are owned by the hospitals and EMS systems within each region.
Each team recruits and trains its own members.

The SMAT Type II teams are part of the state’s three-tiered medical response system. The trailers are being purchased with a federal Health Resources Services Administration grant to the state for medical surge capacity.

The eight Type II teams and associated equipment and staff, if all deployed, can be configured into a 400-bed field hospital. Over the next 12 months, the units will be outfitted with digital X-ray and laboratory equipment.

Additional equipment for emergency response includes a SMAT I unit based in Winston-Salem. The 60- to 100-bed field hospital can be deployed within 24 hours with a staff of medical doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other healthcare professionals. Also, a network of SMAT Type III teams is already equipped and serving 29 counties and Cherokee Tribal Emergency Medical Services. These teams are comprised primarily by emergency response personnel and are capable of providing pre-hospital emergency care and patient decontamination. Type III teams respond to local events that do not require large-scale medical surge capabilities.