Collaborating to build emergency preparedness capacity: Forming a sub-regional volunteer medical corps

Recent disasters such as the 2005 Gulf Coast hurricanes have underscored the need for enhanced local response capacity. Convergent volunteerism is a common occurrence following most disasters, and while volunteers represent an essential segment of the emergency response community, they must be trained and credentialed in order to be meaningfully incorporated into response activities. In 2002, the U.S. Office of the Surgeon General established the Medical Reserve Corps (MRC) program to address these needs prospectively, and as of February 2007 over 625 local MRC units have been established nationally. However, the recruitment, training, credentialing, and tracking of volunteers at the local level can be resource intensive. In April 2006, a coalition of local health departments from seven Massachusetts towns collaborated to form a sub-regional Volunteer Medical Corps (VMC). By sharing resources for administration, marketing, and training, the towns were collectively able to engage over 900 volunteers, offer training on eight topics, and provide opportunities for practice through hands-on exercises. This unique sub-regional approach allowed each community to maintain its autonomy and appeal directly to local citizens, while benefiting from the increased capacity achieved through pooling resources and collaborating on decision-making. In addition to establishing a robust cohort of volunteers, the opportunities to collaborate on this initiative served to build lasting partnerships among the seven health departments that have since been sustained and utilized in other contexts of their work. It is our hope that these experiences can serve as a model for other communities interested in forming a collaborative MRC.