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Strike stressed health care system

BY LUIS PEREZ and LAUREN TERRAZZANO | STAFF WRITERS

December 23, 2005

Hundreds of home health aides were stranded miles away from their elderly clients. Blood wasn't flowing to area blood banks. And many who depend on lifesaving treatment, from kidney dialysis to chemotherapy, found that they were stranded because there were no buses and trains to get them where they needed to be to receive help.

The transit walkout that lasted 59 hours dealt a powerful blow to the several key parts of the area's health care system, delivering a blood emergency shortage and giving providers their first glimpse in 25 years of the havoc a prolonged transit strike could cause.

"A long strike would absolutely have created bigger challenges for hospitals to provide adequate patient care," said Brian Conroy, spokesman for the Greater New York Hospital Association, which represents more than 200 public and private hospitals.

Across the region, hospitals reported that they were well geared to handle a crisis -- armed with elaborate emergency management plans put in place after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Still, three days without trains and buses created problems that escalated with each moment. "Each day in New York City, we are losing six to 10 blood drives -- 500 to 750 pints of blood a day," Linda Levi, a spokeswoman for the New York Blood Center, said before the strike ended at 3 p.m. Thursday. Normally, she added, blood centers receive 2,000 pints of blood a day.

About 12 hours into the strike on Tuesday afternoon, the organization declared a state of emergency as blood drives were cancelled around the five boroughs. The demand continued even as trains and buses began rolling again.

"It's a precious commodity with a limited shelf life and every day we need people to come in," said Levi, who urged donors to visit clinics on Long Island, New Jersey or Westchester.

At St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan, which has campuses in midtown and the Upper West Side, more walk-in patients arrived at emergency rooms -- many of them kidney patients unable to get to their regular dialysis centers.

"They can't make it where they need to go and we, in turn, are providing dialysis," Jim Mandler, a spokesman for the hospital, said.

Getting to the hospital for other reasons was another struggle. One visitor to the emergency room, Dorothy Nesbitt, said she waited nearly an hour in the cold for a cab so she could get her 6-year-old son to the nearest hospital. He had a high fever. "It was awful," Nesbitt, 32, of Harlem, said.

Mandler also added that a fair number of walk-in patients included recovering drug addicts who needed their daily methadone treatment.

He said Thursday night he was happy the strike was resolved. "We've weathered the storm and it was tough. People went through extraordinary measures to get here."

A spokeswoman from the Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan said 10 to 12 percent of regularly scheduled chemotherapy patients missed their treatments, but the hospital dispatched shuttle buses to pick up patients and employees.

Since the strike began, more than 15,000 home-health aides and nurses reported trouble getting to their homebound clients, who depend on them for eating, taking a bath or getting around.

"We're talking about huge numbers of people fanning out all over the city in almost every neighborhood," said Lyle Churchill, spokesman for the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, which serves 13,000 home-bound elderly daily. The agency says it was well-prepared, reserving blocks of hotel rooms in Manhattan, arranging buses and carpools, and assigning overlapping shifts. Still, on the first day of the strike, traffic gridlock turned the east and west sides of midtown into parking lots.

"It was a management challenge and the tab will be fairly substantial when we add it all up," Churchill said.

To donate blood, call the New York Blood Center's hotline, 800-933-2566 or visit www .nybloodcenter.org.