Book: NY's Largest Hospital Network Bought Garden Hoses to Fix Ventilators

The shocking new book “Leading Through a Pandemic” chronicles the challenges of battling COVID-19 during the height of the pandemic in New York City. It discusses the frustration of frontline medical providers, who often lacked the proper equipment to care for their patients, saying that at one point, staffers at Northwell Health, New York’s largest hospital network, were forced to purchase garden hoses from a hardware store to make ventilators work.

According to Fox News, Michael Dowling, the CEO of Northwell Health, and others who experienced dire shortages battling the pandemic are now looking to buy medical supply companies themselves to cut their reliance on China and other countries.

“We should never again have to buy less than a robust stockpile of ventilators and other essential equipment,” he said. “Overreliance on China to manufacture vital supplies is a perilous gamble.”

Northwell Health’s 23 hospitals treated around 70,000 COVID-19 patients, the most in any part of the country. Dowling writes that staffers even had to resort to creating 3D printed parts to make breathing machines and nasal swabs to test patients.

The 187-page book written by Dowling and Northwell Health’s chief editor Charles Kenney, reveals that hospitals received defective ventilators from New York state, and outlines ways the network plans to revamp its policies for future pandemics, including manufacturing their own medical equipment, according to the New York Post.

“We’re in talks with a couple of companies. You can’t depend on people overseas for supplies when you are in the middle of a war,” Dowling told the Post.