By Mary Elizabeth Lonergan
In March, the National Emergency Management Association (NEMA), a CSG affiliated organization, is hosting an Emergency Management Virtual Learning Lab series exploring topics selected by NEMA members to address timely issues in emergency management and to address lessons learned over the past year. To view the recordings of these sessions, visit the NEMA YouTube Channel.
National Emergency Management Association educated audiences on lessons learned during COVID-19 from different points of distribution during a recent Virtual Learning Lab.
Tim Masterson, executive director of Products for Buffalo Computer Graphics, kicked off the discussion by sharing his team’s technological struggles as they tried to create space for staging of necessary supplies like personal protective gear, and the change of those spaces into now vaccine areas. These spaces are called PODs, or points of distribution.
“This began for us at the start as the demands for PPE, hospitals that needed masks and gowns, sites that needed equipment. This is where we began to learn a lot of our lessons that we carried forward with PODs,” said Masterson. “The first thing we identified we needed for these sites was a quick, easy form that we could develop, and they could report what they had day-to-day.”
Masterson explained that his role is to ensure each site had enough inventory to supply organizations like hospitals. He said training, regulatory challenges, technical difficulties, future tracking and warehousing and distribution were some of the most difficult obstacles they encountered.
“One of the biggest ones… How do we make sure we get that security in place— the tracking in place, the auditing in place—to make sure that tool is going to keep us in compliance,” Masterson said.
Chris Breitbach, director of emergency management for Allina Healthcare, spoke on a recent mission of supporting Quad County, Nevada Public Health on vaccine rollout.
“The team I led, we went out as a health and medical task force,” he said. “We’re small, we’re mobile and we’re more responsive and able to move around quickly. We did vaccine clinics at a variety of venues.”
Breitbach said he had researched work done in Minnesota regarding vaccine rollouts and was able to make changes to previously created plans.
“I knew some of the complex nature of setting up these vaccine clinics,” he said. “Walking into a different state, I wanted to have an idea of what was happening…we dusted off our closed POD plan, we changed a few words from ‘flu vaccinations’ to ‘COVID’ and made a couple of small modifications.”
Breitbach credited quality information between teams as a reason for a successful mission and he shared the purpose of Disaster Medical Assistance Teams (DMAT).
“We are in every corner of the country,” he said. “DMAT is helping support state and local assets with some of this vaccine work.”
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To view recordings of the Emergency Management Virtual Learning Lab series, visit the NEMA YouTube channel: youtube.com/user/NEMAforyou.