SNS and Remembering Hurricane Katrina

Colorado is hosting a workshop for the Strategic National Stockpile this week.

The SNS is the federal government's way of setting aside lots of supplies, including medicines, in case of a large-scale public health emergency.

With us today in Denver are people from all over the mountain states and several others. I am particularly impressed with a pharmacist from Nebraska and his commitment to making the SNS work for his state.

Colorado has a really well managed SNS program.

In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention evaluated the Colorado program recently and rated us 90 percent on the assessment, a significant improvement for the state's planning efforts over the last year.

Of course, there is always room for improvement, and we keep working toward that 100 percent.

Thinking about SNS and medical needs makes me remember Hurricane Katrina - there were many unanticipated medical needs during that real-life "exercise."

Colorado learned a lot from the Hurricane Katrina evacuation. When all those people landed on our turf, the responders had a crash course in setting up a small city to help meet the immediate and ongoing needs of the evacuated people.

Lo and behold, the responders quickly found out that it wasn't medical needs related to the hurricane or the evacuation that were the problem. It was problems related to chronic health conditions and poor medical care among the poorest of the poor from Louisiana and Mississippi.

There were two particularly interesting issues to me.

First, it was the already established personal relationships among public health staff that really made the public health/medical response work.

The chief medical officer quickly realized that we needed to bring the medical care to the people, because of the enormity of the needs. He just had to make one phone call to a physician friend at Denver Health to make that happen.

The Lesson? The personal relationships you make along the way in your career can really make a difference.

Second, did you know that oral health - dental health, that is - is a key to general health? If your teeth hurt, you can't eat healthy food, and if you can't eat healthy food, you aren't going to get well.

The low-income population of Louisiana that had to be evacuated to Denver and other areas of the country didn't have good dental care at home. Some of them had dental work such as bridges and false teeth that were lost in the storm and the evacuation. The state's oral health coordinator helped get a mobile dentistry unit out to the site.

I wouldn't have thought that dental care would be a priority in an emergency response, would you?

The Lesson? We have to anticipate meeting critical/chronic medical needs that are totally unrelated to a public health emergency or natural disaster.

How about you?

Did you learn anything valuable from watching the Hurricane Katrina response unfold, or from actually helping with the response in some way?

And, hey, let's keep it clean, okay? FEMA has been bashed enough!

Please post your comments, or, if that doesn't work, let me know at barbara.beiser@state.co.us. We're still figuring out how the blogging technology works best.

And, don't forget to take the poll that we posted yesterday!