Personal identity verification for regional emergency workers.

South Central Texas emergency planners have organised a regional Personal Identity Verification (PIV) project for hospital and emergency workers. This paper describes the development and administrative challenges in designing and implementing an electronic PIV system across multiple organisations in a 22-county region.

Promoting regional disaster preparedness among rural hospitals.

Context And Purpose: Rural communities face substantial risks of natural disasters but rural hospitals face multiple obstacles to preparedness. The objective was to create and implement a simple and effective training and planning exercise to assist individual rural hospitals to improve disaster preparedness, as well as to enhance regional collaboration among these hospitals.

Methods: The exercise was offered to rural hospitals enrolled with the Rural and Community Health Institute of the Texas A&M University System Health Science Center, and 17 participated.

Developing disaster preparedness competence: an experiential learning exercise for multiprofessional education.

Background: The hurricane disasters of 2005 and the threat of pandemic infectious diseases compel medical educators to develop emergency preparedness training for medical students and other health care professional students.

Description: This article describes an experiential exercise for learning a number of the general core competencies in the 2003 AAMC report titled "Training Future Physicians about Weapons of Mass Destruction." A modified tabletop exercise for medical and veterinary students, which was developed and implemented in 2005, is described.

The role of public health nurses in bioterrorism preparedness.

Background: Public health nurses have a central function in the public health system. Nurses conduct disease surveillance, which is an important first step in recognizing diseases caused by bioterrorist agents. Unfortunately, the current public health infrastructure and expectations for public health nurses are not clearly defined and therefore pose serious difficulties for conducting disease surveillance.

Lessons learned from a regional strategy for resource allocation.

Two qualitative case studies focus on the allocation of CDC funds distributed during 2002 for bioterrorism preparedness in two Texas public health regions (each as populous and complex as many states). Lessons learned are presented for public health officials and others who work to build essential public health services and security for our nation. The first lesson is that personal relationships are the cornerstone of preparedness.