Delivering Emergency Medication
Health and Human Services secretary Mike Leavitt said in an interview Tuesday that the U.S. Postal Service was being considered as a method to distribute medications in an emergency.
This is an interesting idea, and it might even be effective. Currently, the Centers For Disease Control in Atlanta maintains the Strategic National Stockpile. This stock of antibiotics and other drugs is designed to be delivered to a targeted area fairly quickly, and logistics plans are already in place. However, with the existing plan, immunizing an entire geographical region or even the whole country would be a huge issue. In fact, I can't think of how the USPS could really handle that either.
That doesn't even factor in the human aspect of this idea. When the postal carrier knocks on the door and hands the (probably frightened) person inside a 100 count bottle of broad spectrum antibiotics, how do accurate instructions get conveyed? Who ensures that there are not any allergies? Who confirms that medications the recipient is already taking are not contraindicated with that antibiotic/antiviral medication? What happens to folks who can't read the printed material? What about the language barrier? I just can't see putting that kind of responsibility on a mail carrier.
Now, this is not to say that the idea is completely unsound. I can see how a combination of mail carrier delivery, along with the current POD (point of distribution) might work. And the local firehouse concept has merit - but that is basically a smaller scale version of the current POD system.
What I do know is that a lot of folks are working on this issue, and I'm sure we'll see some innovative solutions get approved.
"We're looking at having more points of distribution, for example. We're experimenting with having the postal service being able to deliver them, because they walk those routes every day."
This is an interesting idea, and it might even be effective. Currently, the Centers For Disease Control in Atlanta maintains the Strategic National Stockpile. This stock of antibiotics and other drugs is designed to be delivered to a targeted area fairly quickly, and logistics plans are already in place. However, with the existing plan, immunizing an entire geographical region or even the whole country would be a huge issue. In fact, I can't think of how the USPS could really handle that either.
Leavitt said the government's goal is to have the medicine delivered within 12 hours of decision to deploy the medicine, but that exercises have revealed flaws in the delivery system.
"We're finding that the distributions systems are not adequate to put medicines in the hands of people fast enough, so we're beginning to look at alternative ways to speed that up," Leavitt said.
That doesn't even factor in the human aspect of this idea. When the postal carrier knocks on the door and hands the (probably frightened) person inside a 100 count bottle of broad spectrum antibiotics, how do accurate instructions get conveyed? Who ensures that there are not any allergies? Who confirms that medications the recipient is already taking are not contraindicated with that antibiotic/antiviral medication? What happens to folks who can't read the printed material? What about the language barrier? I just can't see putting that kind of responsibility on a mail carrier.
Now, this is not to say that the idea is completely unsound. I can see how a combination of mail carrier delivery, along with the current POD (point of distribution) might work. And the local firehouse concept has merit - but that is basically a smaller scale version of the current POD system.
What I do know is that a lot of folks are working on this issue, and I'm sure we'll see some innovative solutions get approved.
posted by DFMerrick at 09:40
1 Comments:
After writing about this, I spoke to some of my co-workers (all of whom have extensive emergency managment experience) about this issue. Turns out, it's not exactly a new concept, and while planners haven't completely scrapped it, it has too many flaws to be immediately useful.
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