Preparing For A Pandemic—

Health Providers Train For A Medical Nightmare

By Andrew Gorosko

BETHEL — To practice procedures for handling a major medical emergency, which they hope never occurs, a large group of volunteers gathered at an industrial park last weekend for a training exercise on treating patients during a pandemic influenza outbreak.

Billed as a “pandemic flu surge capacity triage center exercise” the four-day program culminated in a drill on Saturday, April 5, in which 134 volunteers posing as flu patients were checked to determine the severity of their “symptoms.”

Of that number, 27 people were referred for basic medical care to a field hospital set up next to Bethel Health Care Center at Berkshire Corporate Park, 10 people were provided with medical information about influenza, and the remaining 97 people were told to “recuperate” at home, according to Laura Vasile, Bethel’s public health director.

The Bethel Health Department was among the many organizations in western Connecticut that participated in the first such large-scale flu pandemic training exercise in the state.

The Managed Emergency Mass Allocation Consortium (MEMA) sponsored the event, which involved area health and human service providers, health departments, police and fire personnel, and medical, nonmedical, and community volunteers.

 The project’s goal was to test the region’s ability to provide proper medical treatment and support to people with pandemic flu who require medical care. The tent-style field hospital simulated a treatment location that would be operating at a time when hospitals would be filled with flu patients.

At the drill, volunteers posed as flu victims whose medical conditions were rapidly diagnosed at a triage center, after which they were referred to appropriate care, possibly including being seen by medical staffers at the field hospital.

Collaboration and adequate preparation are required to handle such medical emergencies, said James Thomas, the state commissioner of Emergency Management and Homeland Security. A pandemic amounts to a “natural disaster,” he said. A pandemic is an epidemic spread over a wide area.

Mr Thomas said it is good that such training exercises are now occurring on the local level.

“As our first time at implementing the medical team’s ability to provide services to the public, we did have a successful event,” Ms Vasile said. She estimated that about 250 people participated in the drill in various roles.

“The best way to save [the lives of] the highest number of people has to be investigated,” she said. Staging such drills helps emergency organizations plan for eventualities, she said. Ms Vasile said that if a pandemic flu outbreak occurs, she hopes that an adequate number of triage centers, such as the one that was set up at Berkshire Corporate Park, are available to the public.

Through such exercises, the personnel who would provide patient care in emergencies have an opportunity to meet one another and gain a better sense of how they would work together in an emergency, she said.

Newtown Health Director Donna Culbert worked in the area of satellite telephone communications at the drill. Such devices would be used to provide voice links between emergency organizations in the event that other means of communication are not working.

“I think it went very well. It was a complex exercise because so many disciplines were involved… It was good to have all those disciplines there and to interact,” she said.

Eventually, the United States will experience another flu pandemic, she said, noting that such incidents occurred in 1968 with the Hong Kong flu, in 1957 with the Asian flu, and in 1918 with the Spanish flu. The Spanish flu outbreak was the most serious of those pandemics, she said.

“We will have another pandemic. It’s just a matter of [its] severity,” she said.

 Although the United States has technical strength in health care, the ubiquity of international travel via airliners creates conditions in which influenza could rapidly spread around the world, creating a pandemic, she said.

If hospitals were to reach their patient capacity during a flu pandemic, field hospitals would be needed to treat the large number of flu patients, she said.

“It was a great exercise. We learned a lot,” she said.