Posted: 2/15/08
BCFS given lead role in emergency
care for medical special needs
By Haley Smith
Baptist Child & Family Services
The Texas Governor’s Division of Emergency Management has given Baptist Child & Family Services the lead role in care for medical special needs disaster evacuees.
The San Antonio-based agency will provide medical special needs shelter training sessions for cities and counties statewide in the next year.
Medical special needs shelters temporarily house people who do not fit in the massive general population shelters because they need basic medical attention, a caregiver, medical support or monitoring, or they possess extensive equipment needs. They may also be individuals with an acute illness or who are considered mentally fragile.
| Marla Rushing, Baptist Child & Family Services director of corporate training, counsels a new arrival from New Orleans as the first wave of Hurricane Katrina evacuees arrived in San Antonio. Rushing will be heavily involved in the agency's new work with the state training communities how to establish and staff medical special need shelters. (Photo by Craig Bird/BCFS) |
Baptist Child & Family Services already has responsibility for manning and managing medical special needs shelters anytime there is a mass evacuation to San Antonio—an automatic event when a major hurricane hits the Texas coast. When Hurricane Dean threatened last Fall, the agency and its partner churches prepared to care for up to 5,000 people.
“One of the greatest weaknesses exposed by the largest disaster to ever strike American soil was the lack of planning and preparedness to care for the very people who are most vulnerable,” said BCFS president Kevin Dinnin, reflecting back on Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. “Yet most organizations have been afraid to care for medical special needs evacuees and turned them away, either out of fear or lack of knowledge. BCFS was chosen to take on this task due to our past experience in caring for people considered society’s most vulnerable.
“We learned from our experience that there was a great need for comprehensive medical special needs policies, procedures and training , considering no one can predict a catastrophe whether a natural disaster or man made threat,” said Marla Rushing, director of corporate training at Baptist Child & Family Services.
“The principal objective for the medical special needs training will be to educate jurisdictions and health care professionals on staffing, equipment needs, and procedures to run such a medical special needs shelter. It is critical for Texas to develop and increase medical special needs shelter capacity We must never again be as ill-prepared as we were for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita,” Dinnin added.
The new contract with the Governor’s Division of Emergency Management calls for Baptist Child & Family Services to provide training about the comprehensive requirements to operate a medical special needs shelter, including the unique dietary requirements of people with special needs, the identification and selection of personnel and staffing requirements and typical chronic and health issues that must be addressed during shelter operations.
“The overarching goal of the medical special needs shelter training is to make sure that cities and jurisdictions are equipped with proper expectations of the unique needs of persons with special needs,” said Rushing. “We want the training to promote awareness of the needs of the vulnerable within our society and to motivate preparedness.”
Baptist Child & Family Services plans to expand medical special needs shelter preparedness across the country. The agency recently committed to help Nevada with shelter preparedness, and Rushing speak at the Nevada State Emergency Management conference in April.
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