New Mexico DoH simulates health disaster at UNM

Scenario: a terrorist has unleashed an attack of weaponized anthrax onto a southbound Rail Runner Express train. Public health officials need to set up a Point of Dispensing location to hand out emergency medications during this crisis — and do it fast.

This was the mock scene on March 18, when UNM Hospital’s Health Sciences Center and other emergency agencies teamed up for a training exercise put on by the New Mexico Department of Health.

The drill was held at Johnson Center and included 250 “players” from UNM’s schools of Nursing, Pharmacy and Medicine, and the Campus Community Emergency Response Team, which consists of employees and volunteers trained to deal with situations like this one, according to a press release. Other staff and volunteers posed as community members in need of disaster relief.

“This was our first real exercise,” Incident Commander Mark Reynolds said in the release. “This scenario had never been performed before or at a true table-top level, especially with the (Department of Health). As the incident commander for this exercise, with hundreds of hours of UNM provided ICS training, there were many valuable lessons learned that I will use for future exercises.”

In the scenario, nurses practiced dispensing medications to the crowds of citizens gathered during the emergency, including doxycycline and another antibiotic called ciprofloxacin, according to UNM’s website.

“I thought it went great for a first-time run,” said School of Medicine student Aaron Miller. “This is our bread and butter over at the emergency medical services side, and it’s nice to see all the other schools working together.”

Different departments wore different colored emergency vests, and there were even security personnel present. In order to make the drill as realistic as possible, nurses had to deal with mock charts for patients, allergies to medications and other medical issues that would come up in a real situation.

“It’s nice to see that they’ve thrown in all these hiccups that create a good learning environment,” said volunteer Jacob Meurer in an interview with the Albuquerque Journal.

Some volunteers playing the patients pushed the medical staff to perform under pressure by acting rude, difficult and unpleasant.

“You can definitely see people’s personalities come out, whenever I was being aggressive or agitated,” said Trenton Knoll, a pharmacy student who acted as an impatient patient. “You can see who doesn’t really know how to handle an abrasive personality. So what I learned is just try to keep your cool, don’t give in and don’t be mean or aggravated back to them, because that’s only going to fuel the fire.”

Drills like these are performed annually by the Centers for Disease Control as part of a public health emergency preparedness grant, according to the New Mexico Department of Health.

Overall the exercise helped the students learn how to cooperate in an emergency, and was a success, said Krista Salazar, associate pharmacy professor.

“The key takeaway is that we can work together, and we can rise to the opportunity of helping our community with just in time training,” Salazar said.

Jonathan Baca is the news editor at the Daily Lobo. He can be contacted at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @JonGabrielB.