WSU medical team on alert for Haiti deployment

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By Dave Larsen, Staff Writer Updated 10:16 AM Thursday, January 21, 2010

FAIRBORN — Wright State University’s National Center for Medical Readiness has been placed on alert status and is preparing a 500-bed field hospital for deployment to Haiti.

The NCMR team would deliver the field hospital to the earthquake-ravaged nation and set up the facility over 72 hours, Cindy Young, spokeswoman for Wright State’s Boonshoft School of Medicine, said Wednesday, Jan. 20.

The team would include five to 10 people from Wright State and the Ohio Department of Health.

If deployed, it would be the team’s first such overseas mission, Young said.

Wright State’s Boonshoft School of Medicine and its National Center for Medical Readiness have developed and built more than 1,750 surge capacity beds to provide care to Ohioans during disasters through the Modular Emergency Medical System (MEMS) project.

Such assets could be critical in the efforts to assist Haiti following the 7.0 earthquake Jan. 12 in its capital city of Port-au-Prince, said Dr. Mark Gebhart, a Wright State associate professor of emergency medicine and the center’s director.

The WSU Boonshoft School’s Department of Emergency Medicine established MEMS to expand a community’s surge capacity for patient care during a disaster.

The specialized medical assets are loaded on board 53-foot trailers and include hospital beds, life-saving medical equipment and supplies, computer systems, generators and food, according to university officials.

“The National Center for Medical Readiness has designed these medical systems for loads for various aircraft, so they just need to know what kind of aircraft they’ll be going out on and they can pack it that way,” Young said.

Alert status means the team is prepared to deploy but has not been given the go-ahead, said Phillip Neal, spokesman for the Boonshoft School of Medicine. “They may or may not end up going,” he said.

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