By Jacqueline Wong PHUKET, Thailand, Sept 17 (Reuters) - After treating more than 1,000 survivors of the Indian Ocean tsunami, a hospital on the Thai resort island of Phuket swung into action with a well-rehearsed emergency plan after Sunday's plane crash. Only two weeks before the budget airliner crashed in bad weather, killing 89 people, most of them foreign tourists, staff at Phuket's biggest private hospital had conducted an emergency drill at the airport. "Our staff learned from the tsunami that logistics is the main problem," said Kongkiat Kespechara, director of the Bangkok Hospital in Phuket where 30 of the 41 survivors were being treated for burns and other injuries. "We sent three ambulances and a van as soon as we heard about the incident. The next three ambulances went within 15 minutes. It helped that we had regular drills and exercises after the tsunami," he said. The hospital's 70 doctors and 250 nurses carry mobile phones and were alerted within minutes of the disaster. Piyanooch Ananpakdee, a hospital coordinator, was cycling on her day off when she got a text message from the hospital's switchboard. "I imagined there were patients at the hospital and so I rushed here. We had a full staff of doctors and nurses for 24 hours," she said. Staff worked long into the night, reviving memories of the much larger disaster three years ago when the hospital's five operating rooms were full around the clock. The hospital, which has 150 beds, treated more than 1,000 survivors of the giant waves that battered Phuket, Phi Phi Island and worst-hit Khao Lak, where most of the 5,395 in Thailand died on Dec. 26, 2004. Although Sunday's disaster was far smaller, Piyanooch said the hardest part of her job was still coping with distraught relatives. A Thai boy being treated with his father kept asking for his mother, saying she was trapped on the plane. "We're supposed to comfort them, but we find that we cry with them."
