Medical Student Feature: Alessandra Della Porta & Tara Tardino
What is your current role in DOCS? What responsibilities does your role entail? Alessandra: My current role is DOCS is the Emergency Preparedness (EP) Senior Advisor. In this role, I work alongside the project manager, station manager, and team to advance the two aims of our project. First, we aim to better prepare members of our community for everyday emergencies through DOCS health fairs, where we disseminate information about various environmental, medical, and social emergencies. Second, we aim to better prepare the University of Miami student body to respond to emergencies, specifically with respect to mass casualty events, such as active shooter training and hemorrhage control. Tara: I currently serve as DOCS Emergency Preparedness Team Project Manager. I lead the effort in organizing community emergency response projects as well as organizing emergency preparedness trainings/educational programming for medical students.
Can you tell us more about the structure of EP and how your team mobilized to effectively respond to the COVID-19 pandemic? What challenges did you face? Alessandra: While the EP team has a rather small core group of leaders and members, we were able to accomplish a successful response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Very early on last March we were contacted by the Poison Control Center (PCC) and Department of Health to assist with the creation of a hotline for disseminating information to community members. Our relationship with the PCC is something that we have fostered for the last several years and we feel incredibly blessed to have access to their resources on our campus. Over the course of the spring and through the early summer, we initiated and maintained a 24/7 hotline to ensure that whoever needed the information could access it. We owe our success to the hundreds of student volunteers who worked tirelessly to staff the hotline with EP. Since that time, we have continued to work on projects both for the PCC and the university to continue educating ourselves and Miami-Dade residents.
44
