Campus Connection

On the morning of October 18, UMB students volunteered to serve as victims at the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC) in a drill with other local hospitals and city emergency preparedness officials to test response plans to an influenza pandemic.  

The annual exercise, called the Free State Response 2007, was organized by UMMC and designed to test the regional healthcare pandemic response and coordination through a mock scenario of a plane originating from Singapore landing in Baltimore with flu-infected passengers.  

The drill painted a dire picture:  a new, highly virulent strain of influenza;  few medicines and vaccines with which to treat and prevent infections;  hospital workers failing to report to work from fear of their safety; the closing of schools, daycare centers, and most public gatherings in Baltimore;  and morgues filling with victims.  

Participants included the Baltimore City Fire Department, Health Department, and Office of Emergency Management as well as over a half dozen local hospitals and members of the Baltimore City Hospital Consortium.  

According to Sharon Kellogg, UMMC’s emergency response coordinator, the drill allowed several participant hospitals to exercise deployment of their pharmaceutical caches, the distribution of isolation and protective equipment, and the execution of the Baltimore City Hospital Memorandum of Understanding by exchanging personal protective equipment between hospitals.  

The drill also successfully tested a new automated notification system that contacts key UMMC personnel by voice and text messages through recipient’s home and cell phones, e-mail, pager, and Blackberry until the recipient responds. “This was the first time we deployed the system and had excellent results,” said Kellogg.  

Twenty-five volunteers from the various UMB schools participated as mock patients, observers, and evaluators.  Many of the “victims” of the drill were played by students carrying cards signifying their symptoms.  Pine St. adjacent to Shock Trauma was closed as makeshift tents were set up to “treat” flu patients.  

Lessons learned from this drill will be incorporated into UMMC’s emergency management plan, and the hospital plans to conduct additional future drills to target specific areas of the plan that require additional testing.  

“With each exercise UMMC builds on its preparedness by testing our response plans under realistic conditions and purchasing materials needed to respond in the event of a pandemic event,” said Kellogg.  

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