Senior HHS officials visit CDP campus
Department of Health and Human Services and CDP officials discuss opportunities to expand the department’s involvement in the development and delivery of CDP healthcare training.
The Center for Domestic Preparedness recently hosted three senior officials from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The officials – Dr. Kevin Yeskey, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response; Jack Herrmann, Acting Director of the Division of National Healthcare Preparedness Programs; and Dr. Richard Hunt, Chief Medical Officer of the Division of National Healthcare Preparedness Programs – spent a full day on the CDP campus in Anniston, AL.
The group met with Superintendent Tony Russell and other Center senior leaders, and discussed opportunities to expand the department’s involvement in the development and delivery of CDP healthcare training. This includes collaboration on the CDP’s new Medical Response to Overwhelming, No-Notice Trauma course, which is being crafted with the help of a team of medical professionals who treated victims of the Boston Bombing in 2013, and the gruesome mass casualty shooting events in Orlando, in 2016, and Las Vegas, in 2017. The two-day course will bring to 18 the CDP’s number of healthcare courses when it is unveiled in mid- to late-2020.
The group also toured the CDP’s Noble (Hospital) Training Facility and observed three National Disaster Medical System (NDMS) teams that were training at the CDP’s Advanced Responder Training Complex. National Disaster Medical System teams are made up of volunteer doctors, nurses, dentists and other professionals, and they augment state, local, tribal and territorial healthcare entities after disasters.
“You continue to go wherever you’re needed, whenever you’re needed,” Yeskey told a gathering of the NDMS teams. “The nation is grateful for what you do.”