There’s no saying if or when a public health outbreak could impact the Hub City, but the City of Lubbock Health Department wants to be prepared.
On Monday, the department completed the last of a four-day exercise, designed to test the city’s response to a public health emergency. In this case, it included running the point of dispensing operation (POD) at the Lubbock Memorial Civic Center for a Tularemia outbreak, said Dr. Ron Cook, health authority for the City of Lubbock.
“This is actually a four-day scenario that started with disease investigation coming into the office on Thursday. Then we had to figure out what the actual agent was. Then we pulled the trigger… To bring in the strategic national stockpile. The National Guard worked with the CDC over the weekend, and they delivered medicine to the convention center. On Monday, we are opening the POD to give the medication,” said Katherine Wells, director of public health for the City of Lubbock.
In the case of a public health outbreak, the POD is a location for community members to receive proper medication to treat the outbreak, according to the Health Department.
This is the first full-scale exercise in the state of Texas that actually looked into the initial disease reports all the way through to opening the pods, beginning from detection of the outbreak to treatment in the pods, Wells said.
Volunteers were a large part of the operation.
“Our PODs are set up with ‘Just in Time’ training, so that way a layperson could come in and actually be trained on their specific job in about five or 10 minutes,” said Wells.
Cook said these exercises help the city figure out what needs to be fixed in its operations in the case of a real outbreak.
“If you are not prepared to run these scenarios at home, in your home cities, then there’s going to be a lot of death,” said Cook.
Many entities were involved in the operation, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Guard, Lubbock Police Department, multiple South Plains health departments, and the state’s health department.