An exercise in marshalling care

  • Published
  • By Senior Airman Brandon Craig
  • 419th Fighter Wing Public Affairs Office
HILL AIR FORCE BASE, Utah --  The 75th Medical Group participated in a disease containment field exercise Aug. 11-13 designed to test the ability of Hill Air Force Base to contain and treat disease during a major disease outbreak.
 
The exercise scenario used an invented variant of the H1N1 flu virus, fictitiously released into the population, to test the disease containment plan put together by the 75th Air Base Wing. 

"The important objective of this field exercise," said Col. Donald Hickman, 75th MDG commander, "was to walk us through how we, Hill Air Force Base, would command and control the response to make sure that we are protecting the lives and health, to the greatest extent we can, of the men and women and families, here, at Team Hill." 

A secondary objective of the exercise was to walk through a response to a real world threat to public health, the H1N1 virus. "When we designed this exercise," said Maj. Paul Conroy, 75th MDG public health officer, "we used H1N1 so we could bring up the potential problems we could have with H1N1 this fall." 

The three-day exercise was designed to test a lot of processes in the developed plan. The first day focused primarily on the emergency operations center's ability to exercise command and control over the installation during a disease outbreak. 

The first day exercised the EOC's ability to make decisions, gather information, discuss the problem, make a decision and push the directives back down the chain of command, Conroy said. 

The EOC would also be responsible for calling in extra medication during a medical emergency, should the need arise. 

"We also wanted to test our ability to call up the strategic national stockpile, a reserve of drugs handled by the center of disease control in Atlanta," he said, "and also how to access our war materiel. It's extra medications we have for a wartime scenario, but we can use it for a domestic situation if we have to." 

The second day focused on isolating the disease to keep it from spreading. "If you had this nasty bug, we would have you located in an area where we could take care of you, but you wouldn't pass on the flu to other people," Hickman said. 

There was a validation team from Air Force Materiel Command which came to Hill to observe the exercise and it said that the disease containment aspect of the exercise was the best seen to date in AFMC, Hickman reported. 

The third day focused on medicine distribution which also received high praise from the AFMC evaluators. 

"Great kudos go out to the men and women of the 75th Medical Group and the men and women of the (75th Force Support Squadron)," Hickman said. 

Team Hill came together in this exercise to make sure that these men and women who were "ill" could be provided the medical care that we could and take care of their personal needs, he said.