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SPH preps state’s pharmacists for frontline emergency response
By Brian Fitzgerald
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Hannelore Vanderschmidt and Ascher Segall, codirectors of the SPH Center for Educational Development in Health. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky |
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In the event of a bioterrorism attack, most people think of doctors
and emergency medical technicians as the primary contacts for victims.
And they would be, at first, until the hospitals become quickly swamped
with patients. Then area pharmacists would be sought for medicines and
medical supplies.
Indeed, that familiar man or woman wearing the white
jacket in the back of the local CVS will likely be on the front lines
— probably as a volunteer
at a temporary drug distribution center — in an emergency response to
such an attack. A pharmacist could save your life.
“
If there is an outbreak, people will flock to emergency rooms,” says
Hannelore Vanderschmidt, codirector of the Center for Educational Development
in Health (CEDH) at the BU School of Public Health. “The hospitals
will be overcrowded, and doctors won’t be able to see everyone
immediately. So the role of pharmacists will expand. Because early treatment
can greatly reduce fatalities, as well as the spread of disease, pharmacists
will often be first responders if the situation arises.”
CEDH has
been working with the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences
(MCPHS) to better prepare the state’s pharmacists
to play a major role in treating people in case biological warfare is
waged on the public. The two institutions are developing a project to
keep pharmacists informed through continuing education courses on the
latest methods of preventing and combating the diseases that could be
spread by bioterrorism, including smallpox, anthrax, botulism, pneumonic
plague, hemorrhagic fever, and tularemia.
Vanderschmidt points out that
vaccines and antitoxins are already essential topics in the education
of pharmacists. At present, however, are most
pharmacists ready to handle every possible bioterrorism scenario? The
answer is no, according to a March 13 survey of 516 pharmacists. Administered
by CEDH and the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy at the college’s
annual Reed Conference in Foxboro, Mass., the survey reveals that 38
percent think that they are “not at all” prepared, and an
additional 34 percent think that they are only “a little” prepared.
Just 3 percent say they are “very” prepared.
Nonetheless,
the survey shows, pharmacists are willing to strengthen their skills
in bioterrorism response by taking continuing education
courses — 93 percent voted for “live” courses, but they
are also ready to take certification, Web-based, and home-study courses.
“
Pharmacists have six years of training, so it wouldn’t take much
to get them up to speed,” says Vanderschmidt. “Their job
would not only be distributing drugs, but educating the public and helping
to stop the public from panicking.”
Should bioterrorists target
the Boston area, where two million people live, work, study, and visit
on an average day, some degree of panic
is perhaps inevitable. But the city is more prepared than it was before
the September 11 attacks, thanks in part to Boston’s Bioterrorism
Surveillance Project, a Boston Public Health Commission initiative that
is readying the response from hospitals and public safety agencies. SPH
Professor Anita Barry (SPH’88), director of the commission’s
Department of Communicable Disease Control, is spearheading an effort
to strengthen communications systems that connect emergency room doctors,
laboratory specialists, the FBI, fire departments, and the police. (For
more information, visit www.
bu.edu/bridge/archive/2001/09-21/bioterror.html.)
With the development
of Boston’s Metropolitan Medical Response
System, which includes a registry of pharmacist volunteers prepared to
distribute drugs in case of an emergency, the city is also better able
to distribute pharmaceuticals on a large scale. Since January 2001, MCPHS
has been working with the Boston Emergency Medical Services, another
department of the Boston Public Health Commission, to develop a plan
to respond to bioterrorism.
If a strain of deadly disease were to be released
as early as tomorrow, the federal government, through its National Pharmaceutical
Stockpile
Program, would boost Boston’s local stockpile of medicine and vaccines
by bringing truckloads more to the city within 12 hours. But once this
package arrives, there must be qualified personnel to distribute the
drugs, says Anita Young, director of continuing education at MCPHS. The
state’s 9,940 licensed pharmacists, located in or near every town,
are the most prepared to do this, she says, “because they’re
already out there in the communities, and they’re trusted by the
people in those communities.”
Vanderschmidt, Young, Ascher Segall,
a BU School of Medicine professor and CEDH codirector, and Domenic Screnci,
director of MED’s Educational
Media Center, are members of an SPH-MCPHS planning group on pharmacists’ role
in bioterrorism preparedness. Vanderschmidt says that the two institutions
were “a natural match in this effort” because of CEDH’s
40 years of experience developing and evaluating curricula in the health
fields, and MCPHS’s size — it’s the largest pharmacy
school in the country — its reputation, and the fact that it has
the ability
to act as a command center in an emergency. “Our goal is to develop
a ready workforce that’s based in the community,” says Screnci.
Vanderschmidt
adds that the group is exploring possible collaborations with the Massachusetts
Emergency Management Agency, and its parent agency,
the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as a communication and command
protocol.
“
We want to train pharmacists to be the go-to people,” says Young, “and
according to our survey, they’re overwhelmingly willing to volunteer
their services.”
4
April 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations