Children's Hospital Boston | Children's News Online

07.18.03

CHB takes national lead in disaster planning

Children’s Center for Biopreparedness will:

Establish response guidelines for emergency medical responders, schools, neighborhood health centers, parents and hospitals.
Develop training protocols for Emergency Department physicians and staff.
Continue to develop syndromic surveillance and reporting tools to identify significant patterns in emergency cases and catch potential outbreaks early.

his month, Children’s announced the creation of a new Center for Biopreparedness that will plan for biological, chemical or radiation disasters affecting children and their caregivers. The center was created after several federal agencies identified Children’s as a national resource for public health protection.

Michael Shannon, MD, MPH, chief of Emergency Medicine, says that pediatrics is an important component of the nation’s disaster planning. “As a nation we must be prepared to protect our kids,” he said. “As pediatricians, it is incumbent upon us to develop the protocols and practices to do so.”

The new center, drawing on experts from Emergency Medicine, Informatics, Infectious Diseases and other departments, will determine best practices for treating children who are exposed to hazardous materials. In addition to developing plans for hospitals, the center will address how emergency medical responders, schools, neighborhood health centers and parents should deal with children affected by hazardous materials. “Current preparedness systems for children are inadequate,” said Shannon. “Our goal is to create templates that can be used in the community, across Massachusetts and across the country.”

Caring for children involved in disasters poses unique challenges, since their reactions to agents may be more severe than adults’ while the cases are often harder to diagnose. Also, decontamination requires special considerations such as keeping children warm and comfortable. Over the past two years, Children’s has trained about 250 staff in disaster response and decontamination procedures, with the goal of being prepared to respond to a natural or man-made disaster 24 hours a day, year-round.

A large-scale disaster would create other special concerns for the hospital as well, including that the Emergency Department might have an influx of parents and adult patients in addition to children. The new center will develop protocols for a variety of scenarios and identify any special equipment needs.

In addition to its disaster planning, the new center will continue to develop syndromic surveillance tools, which are computer programs that can analyze patterns in patient visits, school absences and other indicators to alert health officials to signs of bioterrorism or other unusual public health events. Such tools take their lead from ED Scope, the Emergency Department’s groundbreaking system created by Ken Mandl, MD, MPH director of Emergency Medicine Research. “With this system, we may be the first to discover bioterrorism or another type of hazardous material event by identifying illness clusters in our children,” said Shannon.

The Center for Biopreparedness was created through a $700,000 contract with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, the Sloan Foundation and other sources will contribute to funding of the center’s projects.-CM

Representatives of the state and Children’s briefed the press July 1 on the new Center for Biopreparedness. L-R: Steve Morash of the Boston Emergency Management Agency, Anita Barry, MD, MPH, director of Communicable Disease Control at the Boston Public Health Commission, James Mandell, MD, president and CEO, Ken Mandl, MD, MPH, director of Emergency Medicine Research. Michael Shannon, MD, MPH, chief of Emergency Medicine, Fran Damian, MS, RN, director of Patient Services in Emergency Services, and State Representative Martin Walsh.