September 22, 2024 – Since last night, Hezbollah has fired hundreds of missiles into Northern Israel. Rambam Health Care Campus (Rambam), the city of Haifa, and the communities served by the hospital, are under attack. The injured are being treated in the hospital’s fortified emergency room. In parallel, 1,000 patients will have been moved into Rambam’s Fortified Underground Emergency Hospital by the end of today.
Israel’s Ministry of Health has instructed Rambam to prepare for an escalation in the conflict and to begin transferring patients into the Fortified Underground Emergency Hospital. Professor Michael Halberthal, the hospital’s director general, points out that the transfer process takes around 12 hours. When completed, 1,000 patients will have been transferred into the underground facility. “Departments are being moved to designated areas according to a predetermined plan, while those well enough to return home are discharged,” he explains. In addition to the underground fortified hospital, Rambam has aboveground fortified and protected areas that enables patients to remain hospitalized without being moved. The hospital also has 24 aboveground fortified surgical suites, enabling full surgical services in a wartime situation.
The public has been advised that in light of the state of emergency, most elective and outpatient services have been suspended.
Preparation of Rambam’s underground hospital includes receiving patients from two other hospitals in Haifa. The -2 level will receive hundreds of patients from Carmel Hospital and Fliman Geriatric Center, both of which still have no fortified areas. In addition, due to the complexity of administering ongoing dialysis treatment, the hospital has been providing patients from the region’s dialysis clinics treatments in the underground facility. By doing so, the region’s dialysis patients can continue receiving their treatments – even now!
Following a direct missile hit in a Haifa suburb this morning, several injured individuals were evacuated to Rambam, including an older man and his granddaughter. He reports, “I was at home with my granddaughter, and we made it to the safe room. The explosion was so powerful that the metal window frame was torn off, the reinforced glass shattered, and she was injured. Had we not been in the safe room, we would have died.” His granddaughter concurred and added, “That we survived is a miracle.”
Today’s current events reveal the importance of Rambam Health Care Campus for the health and safety of Northern Israel’s residents, as a strategic asset for the state of Israel. The fortified underground emergency hospital came about following lessons learned from the Second Lebanon War in 2006. While the facility has been used for a variety of emergencies since it opened in 2014, today the hospital is fulfilling its mission to safeguard the health and security of patients and staff in the region.
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