County crews prepare for the worst-case scenario

    Washington County officials completed four days of emergency preparedness exercises Thursday, including exercises for dealing with a large H1N1 influenza pandemic. The county entities participating were the Washington County Hospital, public health, the sheriff?s office, environmental health, and Emergency Management Coordinator Larry Smith. On Thursday, a group of people from each entity gathered at the sheriff?s office to practicing responding to emergencies.      

    The people participating in the exercises were given a series of scenarios and then asked what they would do in each scenario. For example, the team of people talked about how to respond if the H1N1 virus had infected half the county?s population. They discussed whether or not they should make home health visits or what kinds of precautions medical personnel should take to prevent getting infected themselves.

    Kathleen Brinning, the Washington County Hospital?s Foundation and Marketing Director, said that another issue the group touched on was what to do if a non-English speaking person calls in or needs assistant.

    ?There are several Spanish translators who are on staff and on call at any time,? said Brinning. ?If we have a speaker of another language, we?d have to call in local community contacts.?

    Brinning said that she also has people in the area she can count on to translate documents during an emergency such as press releases.

    ?We have a couple local people who have agreed to translate any written communication,? said Brinning. ?They would be on call so that we could get a Spanish version of a press release to our local media. The press releases would provide education to people for how to take care of themselves.?

    Washington Public Health Nurse Chrystal Woller said her department uses a service called Language Line, which does interpreting over the phone and translates documents as well.

    The emergency preparedness exercise was originally slated for last October but was scratched because county officials were busy responding to real patients who were concerned about contracting the H1N1 virus. Woller said that the real life experience was good practice for the exercises Thursday.

 ?In recent months we have been experiencing what we are practicing today,? said Woller. ?We were very fortunate that the real cases were not as extreme as the cases we?re doing here today. We actually did experience ordering vaccines, vaccinating the masses, and setting a priority group because there weren?t enough vaccines in the beginning.?

Brinning said that in the exercise the group did on Thursday, they pretended that the state had declared a public emergency because the infection and morality rates were so high.

For the full article, see our Jan. 29 print edition.