Medical corps ready to lend a hand

Utah now has a Medical Reserve Corps in at least preliminary stages in each of its 12 local health districts.

The goal of the MRCs is to provide backup for disasters or just massive undertakings — an earthquake or a large flu-shot clinic, for example — to help the existing system avoid overload.

Across the nation and even across the state, they're as distinctive as the topography and the people they're forming to serve.

The MRC concept started with demonstration projects under the oversight of the Surgeon General's Office in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where the nearly 600 MRCs now registered will remain. They're part of the Citizens Corps.

The Summit County corps in Park City had the honor of being the 500th MRC registered with the federal government.

Utah's oldest MRC, formed by the Bear River Health Department, is now 3 years old and has about 85 volunteers. The baby of the Utah group, Wasatch, just got started. Several do not yet have any volunteers on the books, but they've got steering committees and timelines and big plans. They have one thing very much in common: They're all trying to determine what they need to become to best serve their own communities, says Mike Weibel, coordinator of Bear River MRC's Cache County unit (there's also a Box Elder unit under Bear River) and the state MRCs' unofficial dad.

When Katrina hit, FEMA, the American Red Cross and others were bombarded with offers of help. Most of them had to be turned away because there was no way to check backgrounds of the huge numbers of people. A large part of the corps' value, says Bucky Whitehouse, coordinator of Tooele's MRC, is they've been pre-identified, had background checks and are who they say they are. Everyone fears an event like the anecdote circulating after Katrina of the guy flying the helicopter in and out who, it turned out, just thought that would be "cool."

"Clearly the strength and opportunity for MRC is a system where we pre-identify, pre-train and pre-credential volunteers to be able to respond during times of emergencies," says John Librett, manager for Salt Lake Valley Health Department's MRC. "It's important that the MRC is a corps used to feed in, complement and fill gaps within the incident command structure." The mandate, they all agree, is to enhance what each county or hospital or emergency crew is doing, not duplicate it.