Disaster
courses go international
by Toni Baker
A national effort to better prepare front-line emergency workers for natural and manmade disasters has gone global.
National Disaster Life Support Courses™, a national training standard with 50 sites in the United States, now has an international site in the United Arab Emirates, said Dr. Phillip Coule, director of the MCG Center of Operational Medicine.
MCG designed the courses with colleagues at the University of Georgia, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, the University of Texas at Houston School of Public Health and the American Medical Association.
In June, MCG worked with the University of Texas Southwestern, the Drexel University School of Public Health and the AMA to teach Basic Disaster Life Support Courses® in Macedonia as part of a larger program conducted by NATO. Attendees from as far away as eastern Siberia participated.
In July, instructors from MCG, UGA and the University of Texas Southwestern taught a course in the United Arab Emirates. MCG faculty will return in December to help with the first class at the new training center. Courses also are being taught in South America and China.
“We are trying to do this everywhere we go,” Dr. Coule said of establishing training sites. “The world is shrinking. The issues we face, particularly regarding infectious diseases, really are universal. Avian flu is a real concern for a lot of these countries and will be a greater concern for us very shortly. Terrorism is becoming common ground. Natural disasters such as hurricanes and tsunamis are as well.
“Fortunately, disasters don’t occur frequently enough that you can learn from your own mistakes. We have to learn from each other’s mistakes to better prepare,” Dr. Coule said. Courses follow the disaster paradigm: detection, general principles of an incident management system, scene safety and security issues, assessing hazards, determination of support needed for response, and triage and treatment of patients and recovery.
As center instructors now travel the world, they are finding it also feels like home.
“This is an area where we can work together and forge relationships with other countries and serve as ambassadors for our institution and our country to others with similar problems,” said Dr. Coule.
In an effort to share information, the Fundamentals of Mass Casualty Care Program, an overview of the National Disaster Life Support™ courses, is available online at www.dmou.org.
The course lineup includes Core Disaster Life Support™, a four-hour awareness course focusing on medical first responders, helpful also to firefighters, hospital administrators and security personnel as well as other non-medical providers likely to help manage a major disaster. NDLS - Decontamination™ is an eight-hour supplement during which primarily non-medical, hospital-based personnel don protective gear and set up decontamination shelters. Basic Disaster Life Support® focuses on the essentials of disaster management for hospital-based and frontline medical providers. The course establishes common knowledge and language for handling natural and manmade disasters. Advanced Disaster Life Support® expands that base, providing triage practice using mannequins that simulate chemical and biological exposure.
A recent addition is a series of tactical operator courses providing basic medical information for police officers and advancing skills in police who are paramedics.
“Traditional emergency medical services providers do not enter an unsafe scene,” he said. “People died at Columbine [the site of a school shooting in Colorado] because EMS could not enter an unsafe scene and police officers did not have medical training.”
The MCG Center of Operational Medicine recently added three instructors to meet growing requests for the courses. The university has funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for bioterrorism training statewide and curriculum development from the Georgia Department of Human Resources Hospital Bioterrorism Program Office to teach the courses across the state’s eight health districts.