DOH Healthcare Facility Evacuation Center Issues MARO Facility Guidance Document for 2025 Coastal Storm Season
(June 9, 2025) The Department of Health (DOH) Healthcare Facility Evacuation Center (HEC) has issued a guidance document designed to provide NYC, Westchester, Nassau, and Suffolk County health care facilities (HCFs) (all within the regulatory oversight/surveillance authority of the DOH Metropolitan Area Regional Office (MARO)) with an overview of important concepts and procedures they need to know to plan for, respond to, and recover from a large scale, multi-facility, multi-jurisdictional evacuation event related to a coastal storm.
The document includes a summary review of key evacuation planning assumptions and incident management procedures that are applicable across the MARO region. To supplement this, the guidance also contains subject-specific content including:
- NYS Evacuation of Facilities in Disasters Systems (eFINDS);
- Common HCF questions and answers;
- NYC HCF decision-making timeline;
- Pre-storm HCF informational surveys;
- Steps for requesting a temporary suspension or modification of statutes and regulations;
- DOH shelter-in-place (SiP) review process;
- Transportation Assistance Levels (TALs); and
- HCF re-occupancy processes and flow charts.
The annexes provide a subject-specific resource on each topic area and help to establish the context of these processes and procedures during an evacuation scenario.
The HEC is a DOH-led entity that coordinates the evacuation, SiP (with approval of DOH and the local chief elected official and as described in emergency evacuation orders involving HCFs), and re-occupancy of HCFs during a regional multi‐facility coastal storm evacuation scenario with the assistance of multi‐agency partners specific to the region in which the HEC is operating, including local health departments (LHDs), offices of emergency management (OEMs), and HCF associations.
The guidance document is available here, and the 2025 HEC Manual can be found here.