multi-agency overnight training and small animal deployment exercise
April 24, 2010
PLEASE NOTE: This information is being provided solely as a courtesy to the Florida VETS Corps. This exercise is not sponsored by the Florida Department of Health FDOH, the Office of Civilian Medical Reserve Corps or any staff member of the West Central Florida Medical Reserve Corps. FDOH liability coverage, FDOH worker's comp coverage or FDOH other protections are NOT provided to volunteers who participate.
Dear WCFMRC Veterinary Strike Team Members: Below is the text of an email that Dr. Terry Spencerhas permission to share with you.If you would be interested in training with the Florida VET CORPS for one or both of these sessions, please reply directly to John Haven at the email provided below.
The first session requires you to camp out over night and help set up field veterinary hospital and animal shelter for a disaster situation.Last year's training simulated a chemical hazard and required all animals to be decontaminated.The Basic Animal Handling training session we are offering here for the Veterinary Strike Team will help prepare you for this weekend.
The second session is an all day course that will cover diseases such as Foot and Mouth Disease--which struck Great Britain a couple of years ago and required the mass euthanasia and cremation of herds of cattle.In that situation, compassion fatigue and mental health issues for both the cattle owners and veterinarians became an issue.
Florida VET CORPS Members,
We are in the process of planning two training events for the coming year, and would like to invite you to participate.If you are interested, please respond to me directly.
1)We are planning a multi-agency overnight training and small animal deployment exercise on the weekend of April 24/25.The full itinerary is still being developed – it will depend partly on the response from this group.Arrival/check in will be Sat morning.We will have an all day training session on disaster response issues from a variety of presenters.We will camp out that night using the VETS Team equipment and bunk trailers from FDACS.Sunday morning will be a mass casualty field exercise using the animals from the local shelter (I’ve completed an IACUC for this).The event will be at the Sumter County Humane Society facility.Some of you may have participated in the exercise we did in May last year in Manatee County, and I think we learned a lot from it, and we improved our processes from that feedback.With all the weird weather across the country, we think some fine tuning before hurricane season would be ideal.I will be submitting to UF for CE for those attending.
2)In the fall we are aiming to have a training course “Foreign Animal Disease Response”, which is a Homeland Security training course.The course would be offered here in Gainesville on Oct 23rd (no UF football that weekend).It is an eight hour course.It is many months away, but we need to make sure we have enough interest to have them schedule and deliver the class.There is the possibility of having the course in South Florida (location TBA but probably in Ft Lauderdale) on the Thurs Oct 21.Please respond to me directly if you are interested in attending either event, and as more information becomes available, I will reply to those groups.
