Tenet Healthcare Corporation has announced that its four hospitals in South Carolina are fully operational following Hurricane Florence and meeting the health care needs of the communities they serve.
Coastal Carolina Hospital, East Cooper Medical Center and Hilton Head Hospital, which are all located in areas impacted by the storm, had no material damage. These hospitals resumed normal operations over the weekend, and it is noteworthy that they remained open during the storm. East Cooper Medical Center in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, received an exception to the mandatory evacuation order issued by the Governor of South Carolina and remained open with reduced census and an operational emergency room. Piedmont Medical Center was not directly impacted by the storm and remained fully operational.
USPI has eight surgery centers in areas impacted by the storm. Those facilities are in the process of rescheduling cancelled cases, with plans in place to be operational as of today.
Ron Rittenmeyer, Tenet’s executive chairman and chief executive officer, said, “We are incredibly proud and grateful for the dedication of our employees and their selfless efforts to care for patients at a time when many of them were facing uncertainty in their personal lives. Active preparation, rapid response and swift recovery are paramount to this organization, and I would also like to express my gratitude to our emergency response team for their diligence before, during and after the storm.”
“As with any event like this, we incurred additional costs to ensure the safety of our patients and employees. We expect minimal disruption for patients who had elective procedures scheduled during the storms as our teams are currently working to reschedule all cancelled procedures,” Rittenmeyer continued. “We treated fewer patients in our ERs in South Carolina during the storm, but we expect our ERs to be back to normal over the next week as families return and businesses reopen. We will quantify this further on our third quarter earnings call.”
