Dr. John Mullins, owner of the Animal Care Center of Ooltewah and Vice-President Elect of the Ooltewah/Colegedale Council of the Chamber of Commerce, recently attended a joint field training exercise in Terre Haute, Indiana which included seventy-four members from all five National Veterinary Response Teams (NVRT). The National Disaster Medical System’s NVRT provides assistance following major disasters, emergencies or other events requiring federal support related to animals and public health. To foster collaboration with the National Guard and other potential NVRT response partners for the NVRT, the national training took place on the Air National Guard Base at the Terre Haute, Ind., International Airport. Joining the NVRT for this historic training were members of the Indiana National Guard Reserve 19th CBRNE Enhanced Response Force Package (CERFP) as well as the American Veterinary Medical Association’s Veterinary Medical Assistance Team and the U.S. Army Veterinary Corps. The training combined lectures from subject matter experts, functional hands-on activities, group discussions with the National Guard CERFP’s decontamination unit, annual fit testing, and physical fitness to explore development of physical fitness requirements for NDMS programs. In addition to training on core proficiencies, NVRT members explored ways to address the animal issues that can result from a contaminated environment. For example, could veterinary medical response teams such as NVRT augment a human decontamination and treatment element like CERFP? Currently, there is little to no animal decontamination capability in the national inventory. Many NVRT members have the additional training required to perform this mission so the training event offered an opportunity to develop a national model for this type of community support. Lectures covered topics typically encountered in a disaster setting. Presentations in animal decontamination, shelter medicine, animal behavior and handling in a non-clinical setting, and disaster pain management are a few of the presentations given. The functional exercise tested core knowledge in command and control to deployed squads, providing medical support as requested, shelter medicine, and performing mass animal decontamination in support of human decontamination elements. The discussions that ensued among the participants were thoughtful and insightful. The training was a great success and demonstrated the desire of the group as a whole to pursue animal decontamination as a mission concept of operations in the future. It helped to point out strengths and weakness of our members and cache as a whole and provided dialogue with regards to the challenges of animal decontamination.
Posted on: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 12:46:13 +0000
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