Lessons learned from Katrina, 9/11, SARS, and other disasters
SHUTE: What about you, Ben? Could you see putting volunteers to good work – good use now?
DEBOISBLANC: Well, as I think I commented earlier, there were so many people – thousands of people sent me emails in the one or two weeks after I got out of Charity, how can we help? We want to come down to help; we want to do something. And they were people with very technical skills who wanted to come down and set up a MASH unit somewhere. And there's a misconception that that's the real health crisis in the aftermath of an event like this. The real health crisis is people left their medications at home and that they don't have any insulin, and they don't have any blood pressure medications, and they don't know where to go if they have a health complaint.
So what we really need are people who are willing to do bread and butter types of volunteerism in community clinics set up in the region of a disaster - in the catchment area around a disaster. Those are people who could be - who could have highly technical skills but they have to understand the mission-at-hand, and the mission-at-hand is not to do neurosurgery. But we can also use a lot of civilians in that capacity with a minimum amount of training.
SHUTE: Thank you. Dr. Lowe, would there be a role for volunteers in a situation like SARS?
LOW: I think volunteers would be important. It would be important to identifying what skills they have so that you could utilize them. And sometimes that might be people that have either left the field and could come back or people that have retired and could come back, and we've thought about that, and are actually - that's part of our pandemic plan.
But we also have to be careful that in doing this we don't put them at risk because one of the big concerns we had – and as a result, we lost a huge labor force during SARS –was we didn't allow students to come into the hospital setting. We sent home volunteers because we were afraid of putting them at risk, and so we lost that resource and also lost the opportunity for them to learn from an experience like SARS. So it was unfortunate when we look back at it, and our attitude in the future is that we should not do that - that we should include them but we have to protect them.
SHUTE: Thank you. And how about you, Isaac? Volunteers?
WEISFUSE: We definitely believe in, you know, working with volunteers, but we want to set it up before hand so we have a medical reserve core with about 4,500 people enlisted who are ready to volunteer for New York City.
Just one example of where this is really critical – we know that during a pandemic, there will be more need for intensive care unit beds, more ventilators – we're going to need more respiratory therapists. We've actually targeted – trying to get respiratory therapists into our medical reserve corps. Hard to do; they're pretty much in shortage. And we've talked to the respiratory therapy deans in our local respiratory therapy schools. It's not easy to do that.
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