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Rebecca Voelker

JAMA. 2006;295:1499-1503.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Five months after he helped guide a novel mobile medical hospital to aid Gulf Coast survivors of Hurricane Katrina, Tom Blackwell, MD, says the rig had just one shortcoming. "Our patient records system was paper when we were down there," he says. "But now it's all electronic."

Paper records were a minor issue considering the scope of the mission that Blackwell and some 100 other health professionals from North Carolina took on in the immediate aftermath of the most damaging natural disaster in US history.

For 40 days they rotated 12-hour shifts, treating puncture wounds, rashes, infections, fractures, and other injuries for as many as 350 patients per day. In the process, from their camp in the parking lot of a Kmart store in Waveland, Miss, the emergency response team field-tested MED-1, the nation's first fully equipped mobile surgical hospital.

MED-1, a fully equipped mobile hospital that contains . . . [Full Text of this Article]

SURGE CAPACITY