Preparing and Protecting - All in One

Martha Bartzen, RN, east region public health nurse manager

San Diego County is known nationally for emergency preparedness.

To keep that reputation, County employees participate in emergency drills throughout the year.  

What if we needed to quickly vaccinate hundreds of people? How does HHSA staff prepare for that? Actually it’s one of the drills they do often – and the drill offers flu shots to the public at the same time.

Thursday, HHSA staff held a drill at the Ronald Reagan Community Center in El Cajon that doubled as  free flu shot opportunity to East County residents.

“If you can kill two birds with one stone, all the better,” said Martha Bartzen, RN, east region public health nurse manager. “After a drill like this, everyone knows in a time of disaster what they have to do and how it works.

“It’s similar to going to CPR training,” she said. “You do this drill every year so if we were to have an emergency, we could call staff and we could have a clinic like this set up within a couple hours.”

Plus HHSA is able to help protect the public against the flu.

“Flu is a big thing and we’re working to protect the public against outbreaks,” she said.” We’ve had outbreaks in the past so by getting this done we’ll protect our fellow East County neighbors.”

HHSA has been doing mass vaccination drills since the 2007. Clinics like this were used to provide the public with vaccinations during the 2009-10 H1N1 pandemic and in both 2010 and 2011 for pertussis.

Bartzen and her staff began preparations for Thursday’s mass vaccination in September, although the location was booked last year.

“You have supplies that need to be ordered, the vaccine and you have to organize the staff,” said Bartzen. “We have each of the managers in the region identify ten members of their staff who want to do this.

“There are now so many HHSA employees who enjoy coming here that they have to select the ten because there’s a lot more than ten who want to come.”

Public Health Services, Child Welfare Services and Family Resource Center staff from Lemon Grove and El Cajon were all involved in staffing the clinic.

“Of course the nurses are giving the vaccine and work triage, but the majority of the staff is made up of office assistants, social workers, eligibility workers and health educators,” said Bartzen.  “When you have a clinic or shelter that opens up in an emergency, you’ll have nurses in the medical area, but you’ll have different workers in other areas. It’s a team approach.

“You never know when a disaster is going to happen and you have to be able to get your staff going in a short amount of time and we’ve been able to do that,” she said.

Another element this year was having employees shadow each other as a way more people are trained in different roles in case of an actual emergency.

“One of the things we’re doing this year is succession planning where we have people shadowing us so they can see what it’s like to be a site manager or the lead in triage or operations,” said Bartzen.

“We need to be able to come together as a group to support whatever disaster happens and it’s like they say, ‘It’s not if it’s going to happen, it’s when,’ and we have to be ready to go!”