Boston Medical Reserve Corps program

I just started volunteering for my local MRC. My impression overall has been positive. The program is part of USA Freedom Corps which also administrates Americorps and PeaceCorps. Our unit seems to have a large proportion of clinical volunteers and seems to be active. The MRC will be helping to staff a number of flu clinics over the next couple of months. Will receive training on bird flu next week through the MRC...

Here is a map of units in the US.

Some well meaning individuals may not consider the possibility of being forced to serve in a pandemic as opposed to volunteering. Once you train for this position, your name and information is written down and those in power KNOW where you are. You may be forcably made to go to a pandemic hospital and not get the proper equipment to prevent you from becoming a victim of it.
While I applaude the efforts, I don't think too many volunteers are going to get on down to the hospital with a raging pandemic about. If it means possibly bringing the bug home to their families, they won't show up.

The Medical Reserve Corps is a nationwide institution. Its website is at http://www.medicalreservecorps.gov/QuestionsAnswers/Overview There is no standard makeup of an MRC unit as regards skills or functions. Their national website can put you in touch with local chapters. Chapters exist across the US. For example, MRC volunteers deployed to LA for Katrina and served in special needs shelters, etc. However, the focus of MRC is service to the chapter's local community. The MRC is written into the high level US pandemic flu response plan. However, there is no commitment on the part of volunteers. There is a separate program (ESAR/VHP www.hrsa.gov/esarvhp) that permits medical professionals to sign up and be credentialed in advance for out-of-state emergencies if they choose to do so. The MRC does appear to be a useful way to let individuals help prepare our communities for health emergencies.

DWS: Thanks for the info and the links.

Thanks for the links DWS and Reveres.

Unfortunately, the MRS is looking solely for credentialled medical and behavioral professionals (http://www.phila.gov/mrc/). Looks like I'll be one of the unwashed masses again.

That said, non-medicos can still help by getting CERT training. In Philly, the group that does the training is the local SNR team (http://www.gpsar.org). The national program can be found here: https://www.citizencorps.gov/cert/

Another interesting irony: asking for volunteers while still they haven't publicized information like:

the WHO's "Ten things you need to know about pandemic influenza"

nor Dr.Osterholm's testimony to Congress (he did, right? I don't have time to find that exact reference)

http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0511/01/sitroom.01.html
..."BLITZER: One final question. Michael Osterholm, who's an expert on this subject at the University of Minnesota, he's been a frequent guest here in THE SITUATION ROOM. He says this, "In this day and age of a global economy with just-in-time delivery and no-surge (ph) capacity and international supply chains, those things are very difficult to do for a week, let alone for 12 to 18 months of what will be a very tough time."
"You've studied this pandemic fear. How concerned are you ...?"

NABARRO: SARS, three years ago, on a much smaller scale, showed us how susceptible our modern world is to infectious disease carried over borders. I'm very concerned that Michael Osterholm's words are correct,
that we will have to cope not just with the suffering,
but breakdown in aspects of our economic, transport and social systems. And that's what we've got to prepare for.

BLITZER: I don't know how you sleep at night, worried about this as you do.

NABARRO: Well, just to be very precise: This is where you need countries to work together. You need a United Nations. We all need it. My job is to show that collectively we can respond to this threat,
so that others can sleep, even if I don't. "...

If volunteers don't know they are being counted towards pandemic influenza readiness - for a disease that might even have a 100% fatality rate for people living alone or who otherwise will not have care/treatment available because of sheer population volume; certainly there aren't enough ventilators, no vaccines, I don't think our town has purchased anything to give out when the schools are closed and turned into "distribution centers" and it is foolish to think, when all municipalities will want aid, that there will be enough to go around - feds and state already said, "You're on your own". People are not being told their children may die if they catch this, they get told of "plans to hand out medicine to the whole town in 24 hours" -except not saying, We have no medicine for the public for H5N1, and congregating to get it would spread disease,

officials insist telling the public to stock for months of supply chain disruptions "would have bad outcomes", or, say "people know; we just don't need to talk about it" and, "people never really prepare before a disaster anyway; if it happens then we'll deal with it..." (!)

Unethical to not tell people what the planning assumptions are, such as the duration of pandemic: no top-down solution, so, give people the information so they can change their priorities.

Car insurance, home insurance, buckling your seatbelt; if you wait until you are sure you are in a disaster, it is too late to prepare against one, and so too for pandemic influenza, (except on a scale most of us have no living memory of).

Signing up volunteers without telling the public what a pandemic influenza year would entail is just making the future harder for National Guard, first responders, health care workers, and, who gets told to dispose of the mass fatlities. Recovery will be more difficult, if the working classes, and their children, get blindsided by something they could have been educated about since last Oct, when the WHO and US govt. put their pandwmic websites up.

No one whose paycheck comes from tax dollars should be buying the "don't tell the public" (ir?)rationale.

"Will I be safe?
The safety of BMRC volunteers is our highest priority. No one will be asked to volunteer until it is safe to do so."

HMM.

As for all the other comments here, methinks you all misunderstand the concept of "volunteering". Signing up for an MRC comes with the implication that a) you will serve when called and b) you understand and accept the risks involved. What you guys are talking about sounds more like "I'll serve if I feel like it, but only if it's not dangerous." I don't know what that is, but it's not volunteering.

Joshua

I think previous commenters' points included the fact that volunteering during a pandemic has the potential to be far more dangerous than, say, after a hurricane or various other disasters, natural and man-made. There were risks to the people who tried to rescue both humans and animals after Katrina, for example: polluted water that might lead to infections; structurally unsound buildings that might collapse; sharp debris on which you could cut yourself. Many people braved these risks as acceptable to them (many more than were allowed in to help).

Now suppose a risk of a highly contagious disease for which there is no vaccine, PPE may be ineffective (especially when used by people who don't usually wear it), and the case fatality ratio could be anywhere from fractions of a percent to over 50%. Is that the same degree and type of risk as the risk of getting splinters or bruises from going through rubble, or the very slight chance of death? Or is this an entirely different scale of risk? And is this is a risk volunteers should be allowed to take uninformed?

And I don't know where you got your definition, but nowhere in my definition of volunteerism is the expectation of risking imminent death a necessary part. Volunteering for military service, maybe, but not your usual volunteering. People can offer to pass out supplies or feed the (newly) homeless without it being consent to serve during a plague.

Now that you mention "military service"..

There are folks in Iraq who thought they were signing up for weekends and, God forbid, helping out after a natural disaster.

Greg: good point, and one I've made to others. I can see any number of jobs during a pandemic falling to the National Guard... if there were enough of them left over here. Katrina proved there aren't, even for a regional emergency, let alone a national one.

G in Indiana seems to think that "those in power" don't already "KNOW where you are." Best to think again. I guess that since what I do will put me on the inside of such an effort anyway, the MRC looks like a good thing to me. Also, remember that a pandemic is not the only time the MRC would be used/useful.

The problem with "counting" volunteers is that the people that the MRC counts are the same people that the Red Cross counts, and the local hospital counts, and the Local Public Health Agency counts, and they may be a member of the National Guard, too. So if they are even in the country, they are "counted on" to serve in 4 or 5 places at once.

MoM, I do know that those in power know where we ALL are. It's just that if you put your name on a specific list, train for a medical certificate, you are most likely to be called up instead of me, Jane farmerlady.
If that is what you wish to do, have at it. I certainly won't hold you back and will gladly support your training monetarily or however you need.
I see a great need for the MRC, but only if all those who sign up are well informed as to the risks associated with such a job. It's like the guardsmen Greg mentioned. They signed up for US disasters, not fighting an illegal invasion overseas.

In fact, the military reserve corps did sign up for the possibility of overseas military duty. They did not sign up for multiple tours under an illegal draft known as the "stop-loss" policy.

But 9/11 was not an invasion as imagined by our nation's founders; it was a criminal action by a (then) small international gang/cult, basically, led by a Saudi. (For some reason, this administration didn't decide to first-strike Saudi Arabia into a "regime change" and "democracy".) (Not that that would have gone any better.)

We need our National Guard home now,

getting grass-roots-ready in case of panflu; "homeland security", (and, our stupid economy,) needs a healthy, functioning, populace;

one that knows how to feed itself, keep the power grid up, and not injure themselves if it goes down.

And MRC volunteers should be fully informed about the current H5N1 virulence, and expected supply chain collapse, before they give their consent;
not wear "The Emperor's New Clothes"
into what may be a 12- to 18-month "blizzard".