Weekend incident triggers hyperbaric care question
With no local hospital staffed to handle emergency cases involving the chambers, some weigh the need versus the cost.
By KELLY VIRELLA
Published June 8, 2004
CLEARWATER - As three people recovered Monday from carbon monoxide poisoning, the owner of the boat where they almost died wondered why the nearest treatment was in Orlando.
"Why don't we have a decompression chamber available in emergencies in the Tampa Bay area?" asked Anthony Duquesnay. "A little bit longer and they would have been dead."
Duquesnay's son, Garth Duquesnay, 43, his granddaughter, Danielle, 18, and his friend, Fred Johnson, 57, were accidentally poisoned Sunday while napping in the air-conditioned cabin of Duquesnay's 43-foot boat.
All three were airlifted to Florida Hospital Medical Center for emergency hyperbaric treatment. The Duquesnays were released from the hospital Monday and are expected to begin follow-up care, Anthony Duquesnay said. Fred Johnson was still in serious condition Monday afternoon.
The standard treatment for acute monoxide poisoning is three hours in a hyperbaric chamber. Scuba divers who get the bends also are treated in hyperbaric chambers, which employ high air pressures to force oxygen into the bloodstream.
At least five hospitals in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties have such chambers, but no hospitals have them for emergencies.
That could change in a couple years.
Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater, which has three chambers, will staff them for emergencies beginning in 2006, after an $84-million hospital expansion, said hospital spokeswoman Beth Hardy.
Carbon monoxide poisoning deprives the red blood cells of oxygen, damaging the heart and brain. The longer treatment is delayed, the greater the risk to the patient, said Mark Walters, administrative directors for Florida Hospital's Hyperbaric Oxygen/Wound Management Center.
Officials from several hospitals said they don't have the staff to run the chambers as a trauma service. That requires doctors and nurses trained in emergency and hyperbaric medicine.
"It takes very highly trained personnel and right now we just don't have that," said Lisa Patterson, a spokeswoman for St. Joseph's Hospital in Tampa, which has chambers to accommodate six people at a time.
Emergencies requiring treatment in a hyperbaric chamber are so rare it wouldn't be cost-effective to maintain one, said John Peters, a corporate manager for University Community Hospital.
Florida Hospital Medical Center, the only central Florida hospital that provides emergency hyperbaric treatment, sees two to three emergency patients per month.
