By JAN LARSON McLAUGHLIN
BG Independent News
Training is being offered to teach Wood County residents to be the help – until the professional help arrives.
In many emergencies, first responders aren’t the initial people on the scene. And in some rural areas, the responders may take more than a few minutes to arrive.
So the Wood County Health Department is offering Medical Reserve Corps training, designed by Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The training will be held on Sept. 11, from 6 to 9 p.m., at the Wood County Health Department.
The training is intended for citizens who want to join the county’s volunteer Medical Reserve Corps, or for people who just want to be better prepared to handle emergencies they may encounter.
“You are the help until the help arrives,” said Alex Aspacher, community outreach coordinator with the Wood County Health Department. “This can help keep somebody alive until trained responders arrive.”
The training will cover such skills as:
- How to be helpful when placing a 911 call, such as providing landmarks for the location of the emergency, or providing other details.
- How to comfort the person who is injured, or comfort witnesses on the scene.
- How to be safe at the scene of a car accident, so a secondary crash doesn’t occur.
- How to position someone who is injured.
- How to stop bleeding by practicing to use tourniquets.
“We will be getting them comfortable to use those things,” Aspacher said of tourniquets. “That’s where somebody can have the most impact, if they have to wait an extended period for first responders.”
Medical Reserve Corps were first created after Sept. 11, 2001, when it was realized just how helpful citizen responders could be before professional first responders arrive. In his State of the Union speech, President George W. Bush called on citizens to volunteer for the corps.
Since then, the Medical Reserve Corps have been deployed nationally for preparedness, response and recovery for disasters like hurricanes, and medical emergencies like the H1N1 flu which required drive-thru flu vaccination clinics to be set up.
Nationwide there are more than 200,000 MRC members. In Wood County, the volunteers number about 50. The volunteers must be age 18 or older, but do not need to have medical skills.
“These people come from all different backgrounds,” Aspacher said.
And those people are trained so they have some idea how to best help in an emergency.
“We have a pool of people, so we don’t have to rush through things during an emergency,” he said. “The most important quality is being available and showing up.”
For example, in the case of a tornado strike like in Lake Township, or an outbreak of pandemic flu, the emergency responders in Wood County would turn to the Medical Reserve Corps members.
“We don’t have the manpower to do those kind of things, we would need help,” Aspacher said. “We’ll take as many members as we can get.”
Signing up for the MRC comes with “no strings,” he said. Most of the training is optional if the volunteer is not available.
The MRC training in September is intended to cover broad issues.
“The training is not very in depth, but it touches on the basics of an emergency,” Aspacher said. And if citizens just want to get the training without signing up for the MRC, that’s fine.
“We still want everybody in our county to be prepared,” he said.
Anyone interested in attending the free Medical Reserve Corps training should RSVP to aaspacher@co.wood.oh.us or send a Facebook message to Wood County Health Department.
