Setting record straight
Regarding “Disaster plan lacking for dialysis patients,” (A15, March 10): The Texas weather crisis that impacted many of our patients and staff last month was a failure of infrastructure, not of dialysis providers, contrary to what Drs. Klotman and Winkelmayer asserted in their recent op-ed.
Allow us to correct the record on behalf of our thousands of resilient caregivers in Texas and emphasize that dialysis providers were part of the solution. Here’s how. In anticipation of potential electrical failure and water system outages, U.S. Renal Care and other dialysis companies put our disaster management and response plans in motion to ensure the continuity of care for thousands of our patients in Texas.
We coordinated, together with other dialysis providers, for hundreds of patients to receive their treatment even before the storm touched down.
Throughout the storm, our organizations joined together to triage every impacted patient and place them in an operational center. We procured and deployed numerous water trucks and power generators when electrical grid and water systems failed, which allowed most of our centers to remain staffed and operational around the clock. And when local hospitals lacked the resources to dialyze their patients, we provided emergency dialysis to hospital patients in our outpatient centers.
While we absolutely agree that the state of Texas should work to improve its municipal infrastructure, we believe that the lesson from this disaster is that when health care providers work in partnership, lives are saved. We are deeply moved by the heroic efforts of our staff who went above and beyond to care for patients in their communities and are proud to provide health care during such an important time in our history.
Mary Dittrich, MD, FASN, chief medical officer of U.S. Renal Care; Sreedhar Mandayam, MD, MPH, MBA; Biruh Workeneh, MD, FASN Houston Community nephrologist