State Medical Response Team Units Expand On-Site Disaster Care

 

RALEIGH – North Carolina is better prepared for its next emergency, whether man-made or by act of nature, with the addition of State Medical Assistance Team (S-MAT) trailers to its emergency response system.

The trailers and trained staff to operate them are going online across the state as quickly as the units roll off the assembly line. They are financed through a $3.8-million share of funds from the Department of Homeland Security, and about $200,000 from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resource Services Administration.

Units from New Hanover Regional Medical Center and Pender County were on display Tuesday on the campus of Dorothea Dix Hospital near downtown Raleigh. They were available for response when hurricanes Bonnie and Charley struck the North Carolina coast. The Pender unit was activated after a tornado spawned by Bonnie touched down on Sept. 13.

`While we make every effort to have this kind of equipment on hand, we do this hoping that we will never need it,` Carmen Hooker Odom, secretary of the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, told a group that viewed the trailers and a capabilities demonstration. `It is quite fortunate that we already had these units in place in the southeastern part of our state when Bonnie visited us on August 13.`

`These units represent a collaborative effort that helps to ensure that should we ever face a building collapse or, more likely in our state, an act of nature, like a hurricane or tornado, we will have a strong response team in place,` Bryan Beatty, secretary of the N.C. Department of Crime Control and Public Safety, told the group.

The units are a result of a collaborative effort that tapped several agencies in North Carolina. The Department of Crime Control and Public Safety, Division of Emergency Management, worked with DHHS’s Office of Emergency Medical Services. Planning was coordinated with the Division of Public Health’s Epidemiology and Communicable Disease Section and the non-profit Special Operations Response Team, a medical team based in Winston-Salem that forms Level I for S-MAT. These folks comprise the management system that coordinates a disaster response. They ensure that treatment and prevention strategies are implemented, as well as disease surveillance and medical preparedness.

The State Medical Assistance Team (S-MAT) program consists of three types of response teams. These teams are primarily for medical response capabilities and have individual missions and response times. The primary vision is to sustain medical response locally while awaiting federal assistance.

By Oct. 1, there will be seven Level II trailers, each capable of establishing a 40-bed care facility. They will be based at the state’s trauma centers. There will be 27 Level III trailers, capable of providing patient decontamination, triage and treatment. They are being distributed to counties that have demonstrated the need and the ability to staff them.