| 
Carol O'Boyle
School of Nursing
PHOTOS BY STORMI GREENER
MERET fosters learning with and from each
other. At the Waseca mock- disaster workshop professionals,
used state of the art equipment to practice decontamination
techniques.
Waseca community members, including local Boy Scouts, role-played
disaster victims. A similar mock-disaster drill took place
at a Waconia, Minn.
workshop, in August. Both were sponsored by the Minnesota
Emergency Readiness Education
and Training (MERET) program.
|
|
Last year
Assistant Professor Carol O’Boyle, PhD, RN, won a $2.7 million
federal grant on behalf of School of Nursing (SoN) and the School
of Public Health to establish Minnesota Readiness Education and
Training (MERET), a statewide effort to help communities prepare
for public health and bio-terrorism emergencies. O’Boyle brings
a unique scholarly background to the project, which aims to improve
the way health-care disciplines and various organizations and jurisdictions
work together in health emergencies.
A public health nurse, O’Boyle has researched nurses’
response to bioterrorism, international public health and infection
control and infection control staffing in U.S. health care facilities.
“We thought we were being wildly optimistic when we set our
training goal at 10,000—that’s about 10 percent of the
Minnesota health-care workforce,” says O’Boyle. “But
we reached more than 4,000 in Year One, and we’re going to
hit 8,000 next year.”
Debra Olson,MPH, RN, of the School of Public Health’s Centers
for Public Health Education and Outreach, is co-investigator on
the MERET grant. She earned her master’s in public health
nursing at the U of M and is an adjunct professor at SoN. A particular
interest of hers is innovative teaching methods that employ new
technologies and involve distance learning—and MERET certainly
reflects that expertise.
In addition to the mock disaster drills, training for nurses,
physicians, and other health-care professionals has included:
- ninety-minute Emergency Readiness Rounds on current
issues and controversies in emergency readiness
and response (for example, allocating a limited supply
of ventilators and related ethical issues);
- workshops on communicating during a crisis; and
- train-the-trainer workshops on how to design, conduct and evaluate
tabletop exercises for public health preparedness.
MERET reaches a wider audience by providing education on demand,
via live and archived Web casts as well as interactive Web-based
courses. Online modules, available at www.meret.umn.edu,
cover topics ranging from mulitple drug resistant organisms to the
design and maintenance of airborne infection isolation rooms.
“We know from our work educating nurses that as much as
people enjoy and appreciate in-person, face-to-face training,
family and job obligations and distance keep many people from
attending,” O’Boyle says. “That’s why we
made sure to include a
Web component.” Also available on the Web site is “The
Hospital Community Education Avian Flu Tool Kit,” complete
with a PowerPoint presentation, a training script, and posters that
MERET developed in partnership with the Minnesota Hospital Association
and the Minnesota Department of Health.
Help for "Everyday Disasters"
Too
To hear participants talk, the training is nothing
if not practical.
Some who attended the Waseca workshop said that as they tried to
deal with “patients” in the midst of the noise and simulated
chaos of the triage exercise, their hands were actually shaking.
They talked about the importance of communicating cross-discipline:
A “line”may mean an IV to a nurse or doctor, but something
else to a firefighter and something else again to a police officer.
They learned techniques that anticipate the difficulty of performing
even routine tasks like counting patients in a disaster area where
no one is standing still. Safety, they found out, refers not only
to expected problems like contamination, but to situations they’ve
never thought about, like dealing with unruly patients reacting
out of panic, injury… or even ill intent. They learned rubrics
for “what to do when you don’t even know what you’re
dealing with.”
The training particularly useful because it does
more than prepare people for the avian flu or a terrorist attack
that may never come; training particpipants say it will help them
deal with more common health challenges. Says Margo Bjork, emergency
coordinator at Sibley Medical Center in rural Arlington, Minn.,
“We’re not expecting bio-terrorists in our area, but
we do have meth labs, ammonia tanks, tornadoes that could hit a
food plan, planes spraying crops….”Molly Delaney, a
Fairview nurse from the metro area, said she appreciated the decontamination
training because “We have a lot of 21-year-olds doing 21 shots
on their birthdays, and we don’t know what else they might
have on them.”
Learning from Katrina: Expand the System
“A powerful change has occurred in America,” O’Boyle
says.
“September 11 showed us we were vulnerable to an unconventional
attack, and Hurricane Katrina showed us that our system could fail.We
were all stunned to see a major American city deteriorate into anarchy.”
In Minnesota, a substantial surge in patients would clearly strain
the capacity of the health-care system to provide care, especially
in rural and isolated areas. To expand the available workforce,MERET
is developing content, materials, and tools health-care workers
can use to train lay and professional volunteers to mobilize quickly
and assist in the event of a bioterrorism attack or other public
health emergency. MERET aims to reach trainers from 75 percent of
Minnesota’s counties by the end of Year Three.
O’Boyle hopes to create incentives for agencies to continue
taking advantage of MERET’s many training and education
opportunities. “There’s always a bit of tension,”
she says,“because money used for preparedness is not available
for infrastructure, wages and other resources.” Incentives
available this year will include academic credit and CEUs for participation
in Emergency Readiness Rounds and other courses. O’Boyle is
also working with the Minnesota Department of Health to develop
criteria for awarding certificates that would publicly
recognize the readiness of health-care facilities whose employees
have participated in emergency preparedness training.
By Amy Barrett
Reprinted with permission from the Fall 2006 edition of Minnesota
Nursing, a publication of the School of Nursing.
|
