XENIA — The National Association of County and City Health Officials, the voice of the country’s nearly 3,000 local health departments, awarded Greene County Medical Reserve Corps the 2023 Medical Reserve Corps Operational Readiness Award.
The awards were made possible through a cooperative agreement with the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response’s Medical Reserve Corps Program Office to build the operational readiness capabilities of MRC units to meet the emergency preparedness and response needs of Greene County Public Health’s local, regional, and statewide stakeholders.
Greene County MRC was awarded $5,000 as one of 146 MRC units out of 800 nationally selected to receive this competitive award to build or strengthen MRC response capabilities. The MRC is a national network of volunteers, organized locally to improve the health and safety of their communities. The MRC network comprises approximately 200,000 volunteers in roughly 800 community-based units located throughout the United States and its territories. In COVID-19 response alone, from March 2020 through March 2022, MRC volunteers contributed approximately 3.8 million hours of service, resulting in a workforce savings of $132 million. Greene County MRC volunteers provided a total of 14,810 hours with a wage equivalent value of $569,040.
The award to Greene County MRC is being used to build MRC response capabilities targeted to provide support of collaborative training for the eight counties in west central Ohio. The training involves the MRC units from Darke, Preble, Shelby, Miami, Montgomery, Champaign, Clark, and Greene. Other agencies that are involved include City of Dayton Fire and EMS, the Ohio Department of Health’s Radiation Branch, Wright State University’s Boonshoft College of Medicine (Undergraduate Nursing Program and the Graduate Program in Public Health), and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine Department of Environmental Health Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.
The training will focus on a community reception center set up in response to a radiation disaster where persons would be screened for contamination, cared for, and decontaminated, if needed. The training was held at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds on Oct 28. Greene County MRC used its funding to support the training and to purchase radiation detectors. More than 100 volunteer medical professionals were trained to respond to a radiation emergency.
For more information about the Greene County MRC, visit www.gcph.info or call 937-374-5600.
