Preparing Healthcare for Catastrophes

Today, we spoke to Dr. Jeffrey Freeman, who directs the National Center for Disaster Medicine and Public Health (NCDMPH). Dr. Freeman leads a team that Congress has tasked with studying something called the National Disaster Medical System, which would coordinate how we treat casualties in the event of a hot war with a peer.

Freeman worries that our on-paper system for distributing patients is likely to collapse once the shooting starts, if we don’t make serious reforms.

Timestamps:

* (00:00) Introduction

* (00:18) Working with INDOPACOM

* (3:55) 1,000 casualties, every day, for 100 days

* (11:27) What private sector hospitals can expect

* (23:43) Preparing for situations you can’t predict

* (37:32) What happens when digital systems go down?

* (44:19) What’s the potential scale of a conflict like this?

You can read the full interview transcript at www.statecraft.pub.

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