The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) within HHS https:///www.phe.gov awarded two $3 million grant awards to study how a new Regional Disaster Health Response System could improve disaster medical care. Two pilot projects will be initiated to study ways to improve care involving trauma, care for burns, or to provide other specialty care.
Nebraska Medicine in Omaha https://ww.nebraskamed.com and Massachusetts General Hospital https://www.massgeneral.org received the grants from ASPR’s Hospital Preparedness Program to conduct the pilot projects. Nebraska Medicine and Massachusetts General Hospital were selected from among 19 applicants nationwide by a panel of experts from professional associations, academia, and federal agencies.
The Disaster Response System will build on local healthcare coalitions and trauma centers by creating a tiered system for disaster care. The system will integrate local medical response capabilities with emergency medical services, burn centers, pediatric hospitals, labs, and outpatient services to meet healthcare needs as created by disasters.
Each pilot program must:
- Build a partnership to provide disaster health response to support clinical specialty care
- Align plans, policies, and procedures for clinical excellence in disasters
- Increase statewide and regional medical surge capacity
- Improve statewide and regional situational awareness such as the availability of hospital beds
- Develop the metrics to test the regional system’s capabilities
As Dr. Robert Kadlec, HHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response said, “The system will draw on the existing U.S. healthcare infrastructure, pulling together private sector and federal resources in a way that has never been done.”