The Puerto Rico Healthcare System Before and After Three Public Health Disasters

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PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Intense natural disasters including hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes have become more frequent and closely spaced in recent years. Large scale natural disasters can severely damage and degrade health care facility structural integrity and equipment, create environmental hazards, and negatively affect health service delivery (e.g., cancelled surgeries; postponed preventive care; pharmacy closures; staffing, medication, and medical supply shortages; large transient surges in emergency department volume) – all of which contribute to increased stress among health care providers. Superimposing infectious disease epidemics on the natural disasters further exacerbates stress on the health care system. Over the span of 3 years, Puerto Rico suffered from 3 major back-to-back public health emergencies including 2 natural disasters and a pandemic. First, Hurricane Maria hit in September 2017 causing major devastation throughout the island. Communities lost access to essential services such as electricity, potable water, safe roads and bridges, and health care. Most of the island’s public and private health care facilities closed or had limited capacity for months. Second, in December 2019, a series of more than 500 quakes of magnitude 2.0 or greater struck Puerto Rico causing more infrastructure damage to many struggling health facilities and leaving thousands homeless or living outside in their yards. Third, Puerto Rico continues to deal with the novel coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) pandemic. This study will provide a unique opportunity to understand the effects of 3 distinct public health emergencies on a minority population with significant health and health care disparities. We have designed a mixed methods, multi-level study that will triangulate quantitative and qualitative data to study the pre and post effects of the 3 public health emergencies on Puerto Rico’s health care system’s preparedness, response, and recovery efforts and how the emergencies have affected the resiliency, experiences, and utilization of the island’s health care system. The study will use administrative utilization data from 50 general hospitals and 20 federally funded health centers on the island, qualitative interviews of health system leaders and providers, and follow-up interviews of a representative cohort of 3,062 island adult residents. Using the Donabedian quality of care model and concepts from an emerging literature on health system resilience as our study framework, we will 1) identify factors that influenced the capacity of Puerto Rico’s health care system to prepare for, respond to, and recover from Hurricane Maria, the earthquakes, and COVID-19, 2) model the cumulative effects of multiple disasters on health system resiliency and how these effects interact, and 3) elicit lessons learned from health care leaders and providers. We will synthesize the information from our triangulated research approach to provide data driven recommendations for an effective and coordinated approach to mitigation, preparedness, response, and resiliency under conditions of increasing frequency and intensity of disasters.