What you can do During a Disaster
Planning is the key to ensure that resources are properly deployed during a disaster. When disaster strikes, you can activate plans: Decide on a course of action, secure and manage your office and supplies, send communications, and take appropriate steps to keep yourself, staff and patients safe.
For any interactions with patients, you can be a voice of calm during a disaster. Advise parents to remain calm and answer their children’s questions honestly and with language and concepts that are developmentally appropriate.
Consider Volunteering as a Medical Provider
Medical expertise is at a premium during a disaster. In order to use health professionals’ skill where it is most needed, disaster management professionals ask that medical volunteers register and receive training before disaster strikes.
Health-care providers who want to volunteer can join the community-based Medical Reserve Corps (MRC) Unit, which recruits volunteers such as doctors, nurses, pharmacists, dentists, veterinarians and epidemiologists, and then teaches them to work with emergency responders during disasters and other crises. See the Appendix to learn more about MRC and locate a unit near you. The MRC Unit you sign up for will contact you to complete the registration.
Other ways to help
- Join the Texas Disaster Volunteer Registry, which registers and verifies a health-care provider’s credentials before a disaster. The Registry deploys volunteers to support the state’s public health and medical preparedness response.
- Join Team Rubicon, an international disaster response nonprofit that uses the skills and experience of military veterans and first responders to rapidly provide relief to communities in need.
- Join FEMA’s Community Emergency Response Team, a national organization that trains and coordinates professional responders to help during disasters.
See the Appendix for links to these organizations.
Practice Self Care
Whether you are sheltering in place, triaging patients remotely or serving as a volunteer, be mindful of your emotional and physical resources and those of your staff and colleagues. To avoid burnout and potential fatigue-related errors, monitor and adjust everyone’s workload to provide healthy outlets for rest, recharging and processing the experience.
After flooding from Hurricane Irma in Florida in 2017 (less than three weeks after Hurricane Harvey), Dr. Lisa Gwynn at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine, found that she needed to let her team decompress after treating children and families affected by the hurricane.
We let everybody vent and get their own experiences out so we could be there for each other, because it’s difficult to respond to disaster when you’re going through it also.
Dr. Lisa A. Gwynn (AAP, 2017)
Main Menu