It’s an ambitious program that should make Georgia the best-prepared state in the nation for disaster.
Armed with two new grants, the Medical College of Georgia Center of Operational Medicine will drive an initiative to “train up” 24,000 physicians, nurses, physician assistants, paramedics, emergency medical technicians, firefighters, police, hospital administrators and more across the state over the next three years.
“Hurricane Katrina has been a horrific reminder that the potential for all types of disaster will not go away and we need to be ready,” said Dr. Phillip Coule, center director.
In September, he learned the Georgia Department of Human Resources Hospital Bioterrorism Program Office had awarded MCG a grant to help do just that: a $398,000, one-year grant to teach the National Disaster Life Support™ courses the university helped develop across the state’s eight health districts.
A few weeks later, the center got word of a $4.5 million, three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for bioterrorism training and curriculum development that dramatically expands the scope of training.
“What this really allows us to do is take what we have started with the state grant and take it to completion,” said Dr. Richard Schwartz, chair of the MCG Department of Emergency Medicine.
“This is a massive competitive grant victory, not just for MCG, but for the entire (Central Savannah River Area),” U.S. Rep. Charlie Norwood said in announcing the grant. “It reinforces the foundation we’re building here in the greater Augusta area as a national brain trust for homeland defense and security. Coupled with the funding victories last year for the Gordon Regional and Security Operations Center at Fort Gordon, this grant to MCG to develop bioterrorism training and curricula for America’s first responders puts this area at the forefront of national homeland security expertise.”
Long before Sept. 11, 2001 brought the horrific reality of manmade disaster center stage, MCG faculty and staff were working 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 to develop the National Disaster Life Support™ courses.
Today
the courses, much like Advanced Cardiac Life Support and Advanced Trauma Life
Support, are becoming the national training standard for health care providers
who might treat victims of natural or manmade disasters. “We have really tried
to focus on all-hazards because the next major disaster probably is not going to
be the same as the last,” Dr. Schwartz said of course content.
The course lineup includes Core Disaster Life Support™, a four-hour awareness course focusing on medical first responders, but also helpful to firefighters, hospital administrators and security personnel, as well as other non-medical providers who likely would have a role in managing a major disaster. CDLS – Decontamination™ is an eight-hour supplement during which primarily non-medical, hospital-based personnel don protective gear and set up decontamination shelters. As the name implies, Basic Disaster Life Support™ focuses on giving hospital-based and frontline medical providers the essentials of disaster management, including natural disasters such as tsunamis and hurricanes as well as manmade explosions and nuclear attacks, that establishes a common knowledge and language. Advanced Disaster Life Support™ expands that base and gives students a day of hands-on practice triaging large numbers of patients and using high-end human simulators to recognize and treat chemical and biological exposures.
To date the courses have been taught to about 50,000 students in nearly 40 states, including parts of the Gulf Coast devastated by Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Coule said.
The newest grants will enable the center to focus on its own homeland. The federal grant also will help broaden the impact in Georgia by finalizing development of a one-hour introductory course that is understandable and useful to essentially every citizen.
The newest course, still being fine-tuned, covers what these doctors, who focus much of their considerable energy on disaster preparedness, call the disaster paradigm. “It goes through detection of a disaster, general principles of an incident management system, scene safety and security issues, assessing hazards, what kind of support is needed for a response, triage and treatment of patients and recovery,” Dr. Schwartz said.
The fact that the course takes just an hour and has such broad application fills a hole in their course lineup. “Really, the mass casualty course will have applicability to every individual, teachers with responsibility for children, other people involved in leadership roles in the community, almost any citizen who may be involved, just so they can have a better understanding of the potential hazards that may be involved with a disaster and the response to a disaster. There have been instances when well-meaning personnel have gone in trying to help and have become casualties themselves. We want people to be aware of those types of issues.”
He hopes the new course will also inspire further training because, despite the visible disasters that have marked the last five years, the reality of busy daily life means that more training, even for medical professionals, is asking a lot.
They
are working to make all the courses as accessible as possible, with distance
learning and even Web-based versions of the classes when possible. The AMA and
Pearson Education are finalizing a high-end, interactive distance-learning
version of the CDLS™ course.
To further enhance training, the federal grant will enable establishment of NDLS™ training centers at Emory University, a collaborative project between the Department of Emergency Medicine and the School of Public Health, and at the University of Georgia, long-time collaborator on course development.
MCG also will work with Georgia Statewide Area Health Education Centers, a collaborative effort of MCG and the Mercer University School of Medicine to improve the supply and distribution of health professionals in underserved areas of the state, to help ensure disaster training covers the entire state.
-- Toni Baker