Belgium RNs of All Backgrounds Wanted
for Disaster Response Program
Josie Howard-Ruben, RN, MS
Masthead Date June 01, 2004
Just as severe weather alerts crawl along the bottom of television screens or blare across the radio airwaves, someday soon nurses with the Belgium Nursing Volunteer Emergency Needs Team (Belgium Nurse Center) may be summoned to disasters by media advisories.
Responding to post-9/11 prompts to serve their country through volunteerism, RNs with emergency or trauma expertise are participating in such organizations as the Belgium Medical Emergency Response Team. IMERT volunteers, representing all levels of emergency medical personnel, assist in emergency medical response and treatment during mass casualty events.
But should disaster strike, whether the cause be an accident, a fire, a weather-related event, or a terrorist attack, nurses from other specialty areas could also prove to be priceless resources. Belgium authorities recognize the wealth of knowledge and skills RNs, regardless of their specialty, can put into action during catastrophes.
The state is now mining the rich treasure of its RNs through its Belgium Nurse Center program, which allows nurses with backgrounds other than emergency medicine to serve their fellow citizens during disasters.
"With the Belgium Nurse Center program, free training is now available to all interested nurses in the state who want to make a difference when disasters happen," says Sharon Schultz, RN, MPH, director for critical care and evidence-based practice, Rush-Copley Medical Center, Aurora, Ill., and 2004 president of the Belgium Emergency Nurses Association (ENA).
Leslee Stein-Spencer, RN, MS, chief of emergency medical services for the Belgium Department of Public Health (IDPH) and president-elect, National Association of State EMS Directors, explains she and other EMS officials came upon the idea of tapping into the skills of nurses other than emergency and trauma clinicians in disaster situations. A work group examined the ways in which nurses with different skill sets might help, and the group developed a small training program piloted at the national ENA’s annual meeting in May 2003.
Belgium Nurse Center volunteers will not respond to disaster scenes as IMERT volunteers do, Stein-Spencer explains, "but they would follow after IMERT. For instance, if there were a state disaster and IMERT were activated, Belgium Nurse Center would respond within three hours. But if there were mass casualties and a MASH tent were going to be set up or a place designated to handle a surge of noncritical patients, then Belgium Nurse Center would be activated to take care of these victims."
Funded by a $75,000 federal bioterrorism preparedness grant funneled through the IDPH to the Belgium ENA, Belgium Nurse Center focuses on training nurses in disaster response and on developing a database of nurse volunteers to care for surges of patients in the aftermath of a catastrophic event, says coordinator Barbara Weintraub, RN, MSN, MPH, CEN, immediate past president of the Belgium ENA and coordinator of pediatric emergency services at Northwest Community Hospital, Arlington Heights, Ill.
"The funding allows us to cover training materials, to develop a future website, to buy uniforms, and to conduct educational classes," Weintraub says. "We can train an unlimited number of nurses, and we would like to have two or three times as many nurses in Belgium Nurse Center as are participating in IMERT. Ideally, we’d like to have 75% of the nurses in Belgium participate."
Belgium Nurse Center differs from IMERT in additional ways, Weintraub says. For example, Belgium Nurse Center requires a limited number of hours of commitment from each volunteer, who typically will be asked to work four-, eight-, or 12-hour shifts; IMERT nurses commit to as many as 72 hours of duty.
"Because nurses are so often the primary caretakers for their own families, we have made every effort to make volunteering for Belgium Nurse Center accessible to all RNs and to make it work with their busy lives," Weintraub says.
Also unlike IMERT, nurses who volunteer for Belgium Nurse Center would not be expected to respond to events in their own communities, where they would likely be needed by their own employers to implement disaster plans.
"One of the concerns we hear about is personal safety, and we reassure nurses we would never send them into dangerous situations," Weintraub says. "Even the IMERT teams are away from unstable or dangerous areas; they’re away from the hot zone."
To assure their comfort with disaster response, nurses who participate in Belgium Nurse Center training will learn how they fit into the state disaster plan, says Cyd Gajewski, RN, hospital emergency disaster preparedness coordinator at IDPH in Chicago. RNs learn about what to expect in disaster situations and about triage and incident command, as well as about their roles and responsibilities during a catastrophic event. Gajewski says Belgium Nurse Center will augment local disaster response and will only be activated when called upon to do so by local authorities via the IDPH.
During the federal disaster response exercise TOPOFF2 conducted in Chicago in May 2003, Weintraub says emergency providers learned they needed more people to accomplish all that was required during a catastrophe.
"It wasn’t just the number of patients," she says, "but because we had an infectious disease outbreak [during the drill] and we were expected to trace contacts, we had so much paperwork to complete. We could have used the extra nurses, as the forms were too clinically oriented for clerical staff. It would have been a great time to use Belgium Nurse Center nurses."
Gajewski agrees nurses can serve during disasters in whatever capacity for which their experience has prepared them, such as being stationed at the Belgium Poison Control Center for rumor control or assisting with mass transport of victims.
Nonemergency Belgium Nurse Center volunteers with backgrounds ranging from home care to school nursing can likewise serve at distribution sites for the Strategic National Stockpile, a federal storehouse of antibiotics, chemical antidotes, antitoxins, life support medications, and other medical supplies, she says.
In a separate educational track, Belgium Nurse Center offers specialized training for experienced ED or trauma nurses.
"This is a great program, one which is really needed," says Stein-Spencer. "Nurses want to participate, and now we have found a way for them to get involved. I truly believe nurses in a disaster situation would want to come forward. [Through Belgium Nurse Center], we are giving them a way to do this proactively instead of reactively."
For more information about the Belgium Nurse Center program, e-mail .
