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Terriquez-Kasey’s courses draw pre-med students and graduate-level nurses from as far away as the Canadian border and were developed with funding support from the Department of Health and Human Services. Her two existing courses will soon be joined by a third course focusing on chemical and radiation threats. All are a sign of her commitment to trying to raise our communal level of vigilance by educating next-generation healthcare providers to the sweeping scope of large-scale disasters.
In 2005, for example, Terriquez-Kasey and her 200-member DMAT rotated into the disaster zone in 35-person teams to help victims of Hurricane Katrina, the costliest and one of the most dangerous storms in U.S. history. Although far from Binghamton’s campus, she made sure that her students remained engaged in and learned from the events in the storm-ravaged South. Using a laptop computer, she regularly posted photographs and news articles on the Web, along with journal-style remarks, and assignments that asked the students to think like disaster-management professionals.
“I wanted them to see the other side of the coin,“ she said, “not just what the news was giving them.“ That insider’s perspective put students in touch, for instance, with the emotional and ethical tensions experienced by on-site nurses and doctors as they anxiously awaited permission to go into New Orleans and other affected areas, where security issues threatened to turn emergency workers into secondary victims of the chaos.
The bottom line, from Terriquez-Kasey’s vantage point, is that disaster planning has never been more important. Better-prepared nurses and better-educated community leaders can forge a new path as the nation comes to grips with its vulnerability, both to terrorists and Mother Nature, she said.
Her recent experiences led her to believe healthcare workers must pay particular attention to the special needs of geriatric patients following disasters. What she saw after Katrina intensified her concerns.
“My concern is, how can we help these patients cope and better prepare?“ she said. “We need to have a better plan for them.“ Shut-ins, cancer patients and others with chronic diseases should keep on hand a medical history summary, a list of medications and a small supply of extra pills, she said. Those who must rely heavily on the help of friends and relatives should always keep a small suitcase packed and ready to go.
Patients and healthcare providers alike would also be better off if they could acknowledge the important roles of religion and culture in recovering from a disaster, she said. Medical personnel must see how important faith can be to patients recovering from a catastrophic loss, and they need to let patients talk openly about those beliefs. In addition, emergency responders need to feel that they can draw on their own faith to pull through what they see while responding to a catastrophe.
They also need to take breaks to drink water and cool off, as well as find ways to share the emotional strain. Members of her DMAT, Terriquez-Kasey notes, usually take 24 hours to decompress after a deployment before returning to their families. They need time to think and talk about what they’ve seen and find ways of reconciling that with their day-to-day lives.
“We’re seeing tremendous numbers of patients,“ Terriquez-Kasey said. “Psychological support is a major issue for us, just like it is for them. You realize later you’re still reverberating from what you saw, so inundated with things that had happened.“
Ultimately, Terriquez-Kasey said, it’s time we all accept and embrace an inescapable reality: Disasters are inevitable, and when it comes to surviving and recovering from them, there’s likely no such thing as too much planning.
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