Winter 2004 - Local disaster assistance team joins MO

Winter 2004

Local disaster assistance team joins MO-1 DMAT

St. John's teamed with CoxHealth and the Greene County Office on Emergency Management to form a disaster medical assistance team in the fall of 2002. Since then, the team has joined Missouri-1 Disaster Medical Assistance Team, a St. Louis-based DMAT, as the southwest Missouri chapter. The purpose of a DMAT, which is sponsored by the federal, state and local government and public and private organizations, is to provide volunteer medical aid during any man-made or natural disaster where local medical resources might be overwhelmed for a significant amount of time.

“MO-1 has been in existence for five years and has been deployed several times,” says St. John's Emergency Medical Services medical director Janet Jordan, M.D., who leads the local chapter with St. John’s EMS Director Bob Patterson. “MO-1 is bringing our local DMAT in as the southwest Missouri regional chapter, which includes Springfield, Branson and Bolivar.”
She added the local DMAT now has about 300 members.

MO-1 recently received a $1.2 million grant to develop a state-level disaster team following the federal model developed by the Department of Homeland Security. The grant will be used to purchase disaster supplies and equipment totaling $450,000 and pharmaceuticals totaling $150,000, all of which will stay in southwest Missouri.

ORGANIZED RESPONSE

“The medical community is thirsty for an organized response to a disaster, be it biochemical or trauma," Jordan says. "So many nurses and paramedics approached us about local disaster preparedness, that organizing the DMAT was the only right thing to do."
DMATs from across the country have been preparing and responding for many years to national disasters and responded in force on and shortly after September 11, 2001.

Team training concentrates on the skills unique to disaster situations. Team members must learn to operate and function independently for 72 hours without any outside support. Conditions while on deployment can be particularly hazardous and uncomfortable. Typically the team members will find themselves in field hospitals consisting of tents or abandoned buildings.
“It’s important that we have volunteers from across our region,” Jordan says. “If our DMAT is deployed, we don’t want to take the all the medical personnel from one hospital. We want to utilize our volunteers from the entire region so we won’t deplete our local resources.”
Jordan and Patterson say the plan is to continue to develop the southwest Missouri DMAT in 2004 and develop DMATs in Kansas City and possibly Columbia in the future.

“We encourage folks who are interested in joining our team to contact the St. John’s EMS office at 417-820-5454. We keep DMAT applications for anyone who is interested in volunteering. DMAT members don’t have to be medical personnel,” Patterson says.