MHPC Participates in 2017 McGuire EOC Exercise
On Tuesday, August 8th, the MHPC participated in the McGuire Nuclear Station graded exercise with agencies and organizations from around the region as we worked through a scenario that involved a potential emergency at the station, and how to best protect and notify the community.
Around the region, multiple counties open and staffed their Emergency Operation Centers with Public Safety, Public Health, Hospital, and critical infrastructure partners. These counties participated either because they could have been impacted by the event, or because they would be tasked with providing support to the impacted counties. The North Carolina State EOC was also opened and staffed for the exercise.
Specifically, the MHPC played a role in the Mecklenburg County EOC. This gave us the opportunity to continue to test and develop our role as the Liaison between the two major hospital systems (CHS and Novant) and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Emergency Management Office. It also let us continue to work on the specifics of our Medical Intelligence Center concept so that we can provide accurate and timely information to the Hospitals, EMS, and other healthcare infrastructure partners across the region and state. We used our new EverBridge platform to share and confirm delivery of information. Lessons were learned in how to better leverage the mapping feature from EverBridge to contact our Long-Term Care partners. We also discussed how we could leverage information on At-Risk populations available from State and Federal sources to ensure effective notification of those individuals in the impact area. We were also able to work closely with ESF-6 partners to help fill potential gaps in the sheltering of special medical needs patients.
On top of all of that, we continued to build strong partnerships with the other agencies and organizations in our community.
