Sometime late yesterday afternoon, this blog/toolkit received its 10,000th view.  We’d like to express our gratitude to all who have visited this site over the past 15 months.  We hope that you find the content useful and we look forward to continuing to be a resource for emergency preparedness and response.

Over the past week, Susan and I attended the Medical Library Association (MLA) meeting in Philadelphia and the Virginia Hospital Emergency Management Forum in Charlottesville. We presented a poster (click on link below) at the MLA meeting and received a lot of nice feedback and made some good contacts. (We’ll be following up with everyone next week following the long weekend.) The Virginia Hospital Emergency Management Forum was particularly valuable, as it introduced us to several new topics of interest, and it was great meeting folks whose jobs deal specifically with disaster planning. Some of the topics that we learned about at the forum that will be explored further in the blog include the following:

Surge Planning
Altered Standards of Care
Medical Reserve Corps
Use of Faith-based Groups in Disaster Planning

DisasterPlanningPoster.ppt (6.1MB)

I am pleased to welcome Steve Murphy to our team. Steve is responsible for locating disaster-related resources that we will highlight in this blog and on our disaster planning web site, which is in development. Our disaster planning web site will feature resources and news about potential disaster concerns such as infectious diseases, natural disasters, and terrorism.

To make it easier for people to find our blog, we have changed its web address to DisasterPlanninginHSL@Wordpress.com. Please reset your bookmark as well as RSS feed. See you there!