This is kind of a hard question to ask but I’ll try to explain.
On another thread, I pointed out I have an extra job on weekends and one of the things they have me doing is plotting points of various things on maps they are making.
One of the project I have next is for cities with hospitals in the United States.
It’s easy enough, if the city has a hospital (acute care, not long term or state hospital) I plot an X on that city.
OK easy enough. Chicago has lots of hospitals so it gets an X.
Then I got to thinking what’s the biggest city in the USA without a hospital.
This is where the question becomes hard to ask. I mean Schaumburg, Illinois is a big city with over 70,000 people and it doesn’t have a hospital, but there are hospitals very close in nearby Hoffman Estates and Arlington Heights and Elk Grove.
So I wouldn’t want to count Schumburg as not having a hospital as there are several hospitals in close suburbs next to it. I imagine lots of other suburban cities are like this. Big pouplations but depend on hospitals close to other suburbs or the main city
The other question is what is nearby? 10miles, 25 miles?
I put this under in my humble opinion rather than general questions, as I guess the answer would be more open to opinoin rather than fact on the basis of how close is nearby. But please move it if you have to
So I guess I’d like to know what it the largest USA without a general acute care hospital or access to one nearby (say within 25 miles or so).
I don’t know how much this will help you, but it seems that hospitals in the East tend to be bigger and more centralized than those in the West. It seemed like every jerkwater suburb in California had its own little 100-bed hospital. So it’s likely your answer will lie east of the Mississippi, probably one of the larger suburbs of some big city.
I think it would be easier to do it by county. A hospital in the same county should count as being close and it easy to access the population and the hospitals. Just looking at cities can be misleading since so many people live in unincorporated areas.
Define “hospital”. Almost everyplace on the planet has access to some sort of medical care, even if is just a little room where a doctor sees patient and perscribes medicines and can at least stabilise emergencies.
Don’t know about ‘every place on the planet’. In fact, most of this world doesn’t have access to reliable medical care.
But I do want the OP to expand on ‘hospital’. Does a small, single Dr. clinic count? What about outlying podunk towns that are 50 miles from the nearest hospital? Do they count?
I would guess a proper hospital should have A) the ability to deal with acute trauma. This may mean simply stabilizing patients for transport to a larger hospital. B) lifeflight available 24/7/365. C) a subset of specialist at least available on-call for emergencies. A cardiac Dr. and an obstetrics Dr. would probably be the minimum. People go to the hospital for heart attacks and babies. D) ambulance service.
If my reference skills are to be believed, there are something like 44 counties in Missouri that don’t have any facility with 24-hour emergency service. The largest would be Platte County (between Kansas City and St. Joseph) with a population of more than 80,000. There are several counties where it looks like you’d have to drive more than 40 miles from the county seat -mainly on country roads - to get to an emergency room.
Well, New Orleans proper didn’t have a general hospital after Katrina. They were all closed by the storm. Our Children’s hospital stayed open (it is close to the river and didn’t flood) and hospitals in the suburbs survived, but the major general hospitals in the city were all closed. Tulane University Hospital reopened. The LSU Interim Hospital is also reopened in an old building just north of downtown. Oschner Hospital is close to Childrens and stayed open, and I believe that is a general purpose hospital. So yes, there are a couple of hospitals in New Orleans. Not much though. And for a couple of years, not even those were open.
From what I can tell, the Missouri Ozarks has a medevac network with helicopters stationed about 100 miles apart.
I’m not sure about northern Missouri, but a medevac copter crashed recently on the return trip from picking up a patient 30 miles away, so I’d guess the distances are roughly similar.