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The JQH Arena at Missouri State was transformed into an alternative medical care site Monday (6/1). KSMU’s Michele Skalicky has more…
When JQH was built, special accommodations were made to allow the arena to be transformed into a medical care site in the event of a major emergency. Those included bathroom facility accommodations.Today, the Arena was used to test the distribution of area’s medical surge cache. Area hospitals along with the Red Cross, the Springfield-Greene County Health Department, and the Springfield/Greene county Office of Emergency Management and others took part in the regional disaster exercise. Laurie Cunningham is spokesperson for CoxHealth…
"And the purpose of our getting together today was to really test our system for processing or setting up our med surge cache and then processing patients through that. We've never actually set it up before."
David Hoover is The Region D Hospital Disaster Coordinator with Ozarks Health Ventures, a company owned by both Cox and St. John’s. A federal grant was received for his position, which was created in 2005, and medical surge equipment was purchased—things like cots, bedding, and personal protective equipment for staff. If area hospitals were overwhelmed, the equipment could be used at an alternative medical care site.He explained what he hoped to learn during today’s drill…
"What we really hope to take away is just the fact that, number one, we can successfully transport and set up this event, but we would also like to learn how to better organize it and what all it's going to take for us to move it and get people taken care of."
About 50 Vatterott College students were the patients during today’s drill.
Laurie Cunningham says they feel like they would be ready if a major disaster were to strike, but they want to be absolutely sure…
"We feel like we're prepared to handly anything, really, that might come our way, but this will be a true test of the system to see how long it takes to set up the med surge cache, what resources we might need to support that and then the whole process for tracking patients, the registration flow and how that would all work because, obviously, that would be very important to us in a real situation."
JQH is a dedicated triage site along with some other sites in the area, including the Expo Center at the Ozark Empire Fairgrounds.
