Officials seek to bridge gaps in emergency medical system

BANGOR – Aroostook County’s four hospitals have a mutual-aid agreement for streamlined support in extreme situations such as disasters, but one hospital official wondered Tuesday how quickly help from outside The County would come in drastic situations.

With Bangor the closest designated site for receiving, storing and distributing medicine in the case of an outbreak or biological terrorism, it could take three hours or more by road for those necessary supplies to reach Aroostook County, said Mark Bourgoin, safety and security coordinator at The Aroostook Medical Center in Presque Isle.

That’s assuming that Interstate 95 isn’t clogged by traffic or otherwise shut down, he added.

To his relief, Bourgoin found that disaster planners are enlisting the help of the Civil Air Patrol, which would fly a load of supplies and medicines to Aroostook County.

“That makes me feel a whole lot better,” Bourgoin said.

The hospital official was one of about 80 people from health care institutions, schools and emergency preparedness organizations in northern and central Maine to attend a daylong program in Bangor aimed at identifying gaps in the medical system and how to bridge them.

The group discussed the importance of public and private organizations working together. That kind of communitywide, cooperative effort is what state and county emergency planners are looking for when they disperse $1 million in federal grant money, earmarked to improve emergency systems.

That cooperative effort, using federal funds, can take the form of anything from improving communications between school nurses and the state so as to quickly detect an outbreak of disease, to adding hospital equipment such as ventilators and bed space to contend with the influx of patients from a disaster.

It also could mean providing special credentials to doctors, nurses and other health care personnel, allowing them to assist in emergencies outside their usual jurisdictions, or the use of high-tech equipment such as satellite telephones to assure connections should disaster strike and take out other means of communications.

Through the Maine Regional Resource Center Advisory Committee, organizations are expected to present funding requests in August to the Bureau of Health.

Communications likely is a prominent contender for funding, but officials acknowledged it is a difficult issue. Problems have arisen in trying to find equipment that meets everyone’s needs and coordinating efforts among such a wide range of organizations.

“It’s a nasty bear that’s rearing its head,” said Tom Patenaude, bioterrorism coordinator for the Maine Bureau of Health.

Kathy Knight, director of the Eastern Maine Medical Center’s Center for Emergency Preparedness, pointed out that in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, more than 2,000 calls flooded into emergency centers, tying up lines in an already difficult situation.

“How do we prevent that from happening here?” Knight asked the gathering.

Despite the hurdles, representatives said that it was important to make sure the funding-request process is coordinated.

Dr. Erik Steele, EMMC vice president of patient care, urged agencies and organizations to work together, saying that it didn’t make sense to purchase radio equipment in one area that wouldn’t work in another neighboring area.

“The same amount of money applied in a different way markedly enhances our ability to perform individually and collectively in a disaster that we know someday, sometime, somewhere is going to happen,” Steele said.