CDP teaches medical students ‘displaced’ by COVID-19

At the request of the university, FEMA’s Center for Domestic Preparedness this week started providing crisis and disaster response training to more than 120 University of Alabama - Birmingham medical students who have been displaced from their classrooms by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The training is being conducted virtually, a couple of times a week, by CDP instructors using curriculum the center developed to be part of its library of expeditionary training course offerings.  Those offerings are generally modules of complete CDP courses geared toward organizations and responders with a need for specific aspects of CDP course material but which don’t have the time to attend or host complete CDP courses.  

The students are all in their third or fourth years at UAB’s medical school.  

The CDP will teach the responders-in-training a total of six modules. It will teach the first three modules – Crisis Standards of Care and Treatment Decision-Making, Mass Casualty Triage, and Emergency Medical Response Awareness – between now and May 22.  It will then teach the next three modules – Healthcare Facility Preparedness; Federal, State, and Local Roles in Medical Emergency Response; and Health Sector Emergency Preparedness – from June 1-19. 

Most of the training sessions are from 90 minutes to two hours long, with the exception of the Emergency Medical Response Awareness and Health Sector Emergency Preparedness modules, which each span about 8 hours.

If this proves to be successful, CDP officials say they’ll likely extend this training to other medical schools.