Student Group Hosts Forum on Medical Care After Disasters

Pharmacists critical to health care success in disasters, says panel

By Steve Berberich
February 25, 2009

In the aftermath of disasters, health care teams “are worthless without a pharmacist,” said Robert Barish, MD, professor of emergency medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He was speaking at a “Medical Care After Disasters” forum at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy on February 10.

“I never appreciated the role of pharmacy [in disasters] in the clinical world until I went overseas,” Barish told an audience of 50 students and faculty at the forum. He discussed his experiences on various health care teams after Hurricane Katrina, the 2005 Southeast Asian tsunami, the 2006 earthquake in Pakistan, in the 1970’s “killing fields” of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and disasters in Honduras and Bosnia. “Sometimes the physicians are the least important [team member],” he said.

Pharmacists became the primary health care workers following the 2001 anthrax mailings to some government offices in Washington, D.C., said another panelist, pharmacist Laura Pincock, PharmD, of the U.S. Public Health Service. She was part of “mass dispensing clinics” in hospitals in Washington during the crisis. She said the pharmacists dispensing drugs to counteract for anthrax exposure were the only health care workers for people to talk with while they received medications. The pharmacist’s role was critical, said Pincock, because the recommended medications changed during the crisis, which also underscored the important role of public relations, she added.

Pharmacists were also important health care workers at the Barack Obama inauguration ceremonies in January, where Pincock and other Public Health Service officers were deployed as roving medical teams.

Barish, who is also vice dean for clinical affairs at the School of Medicine, outlined “what it takes to be successful” in heath care at a disaster site. He and other presenters cautioned the pharmacy students not to just show up. “So many of you want to help, but you need to be with an organized group. With Katrina many individuals went there and became part of the problem.”

Anyone interested in serving during a disaster, he said, needs to investigate the various relief organizations and “there will be one right for you.”

He said never before Katrina had he seen anarchy in the United States, due to the police force “just disappearing.” When his team arrived on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, “we heard nothing – no birds chirping, no dogs barking, maybe a body would float by down the river and nobody seemed to care. But the bottom line in all disasters is that primary care is the most needed [service].”

Barish and fellow presenter Ginny Cook, RN, of the University of Maryland School of Nursing, said the work requires team players and no prima donnas.

A fourth presenter, Nabeel Akram from the Johns Hopkins University-affiliated Jhpiego, an international non-profit health organization, said that the U.S. Agency for International Development often provides advanced guidance to health care workers to help them avoid areas of military or political strife during a disaster.

The forum was sponsored by the School of Pharmacy’s Student Section of the Maryland Public Health Association (SMdPHA).

Nicholaus Laughton, a third year student pharmacist and president of the SMdPHA, said the chapter hoped the forum would raise awareness about the key elements required to successfully and effectively provide care during disasters. “Speaking as a future health care provider, I think it is vital that we begin thinking now about what past providers have learned and what we as the next generation of emergency workers need to do to step into the roles of providing care in future disasters.”