U.S. emergency pharmacist team plans moving ahead, but slowly

Drug Store News, April 28, 2003 by Liz Parks

The war in Iraq and the threat that terrorists could attack Americans on the home front has sparked a flurry of contingency planning designed to insure that Americans will be able to get critical pharmaceuticals if a disaster, war-related or otherwise, strikes the country.

One of the newest and most urgent developments on that front is an attempt to create a national system for recruiting and training pharmacists for disaster relief. Those pharmacists could be deployed to disaster sites to help dispense medications and to counsel victims in the event of a biological attack or any medical emergency that would cross state lines.

The war in Iraq and the persistent threat of terrorism have made many Americans nervous about protecting the integrity of food, water and medical supplies. But there is a general consensus among industry sources that the pharmaceutical industry is "well prepared" to manage the emergency distribution of everyday medications, as well as acute medications, in an emergency.

"Based on the response through the pharmaceutical supply chain on Sept. 11," said Nancy Hanagan, chief operating officer for the Healthcare Distribution Management Association (formerly known as the National Wholesale Druggists' Association), "we are even more prepared to move medications through to wherever they are needed. We learned from our experiences with Sept. 11. The capability of the pharmaceutical supply chain is tremendous."

"We are extremely prepared," said Patrick a e, president of customer operations for drug wholesaler McKesson Corp. "In the wake of Sept 11, there has been significant energy at the city and state agency levels all across the country developing contingency plans with drug wholesalers and drug chains, all focused on making sure pharmaceuticals will be available when and where they are needed."

Carolyn Stables, director of communications for the Academy of Managed Care Pharmacies, said that contingency plans for an emergency are easier to implement than plans for an event that might go on for weeks or months, such as it was once feared Y2K might do.

"If an emergency were to happen, supplies could be in a truck and at the site within a day," she noted. "Y2K was so alarming as a possibility because it meant the entire network of communications and information could be down for weeks or months."

"When Sept. 11 happened," Blake said, "McKesson got our trucks from Memphis, Tenn., to facilities in Rocky Hill, Ct., Delran, N.J., and Landover, Md., in eight hours by using two drivers per truck. One slept; the other drove."

Industry executives generally express confidence in the country's ability to distribute drugs in an emergency. Even so, sources for some pharmaceutical associations and some governmental agencies say they fear there could be an acute shortage of pharmacists who could dispense and counsel patients if there is a bio-terrorist attack or any other multiple-state emergency.

"As we went through the six anthrax events that occurred in 2001, we realized we needed to increase significantly the number of pharmacists and nurses who could respond to such emergencies," said a high-level government source who himself is a pharmacist.

"We treated 37,000 people during those six events, and if the events had been any larger, we wouldn't have had enough personnel to handle it," he warned. "If something were to happen on a large scale today, we still do not have enough pharmacists or nurses to handle it. We would be overwhelmed."

Since Sept. 11, a number of pharmacy associations and the government, starting first with the Department of Health and Human Services and continuing most recently with the National Homeland Security Department, have been working to create a National Pharmacist Response Team. Such a team would consist of several thousand volunteer pharmacists who could be called up by the government and deployed to anywhere in the nation if biological attacks or other multiple-location disasters were to occur.

Mitchel Rothholz, vice president of professional practice for the American Pharmacists Association (formerly known as the American Pharmaceutical Association), said that after Sept. 11 and the anthrax attacks in 2001, "we saw that we needed to have pharmacists from around the country that could be made available to any p art of the country that needed help."

A coalition of six associations was formed to work with the government. They included the APhA, which is coordinating the planning, the American Society of Health System Pharmacists, the American College of Clinical Pharmacy, the Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy, the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy and the National Council of State Pharmaceutical Executives.

At first, the development of a national pharmacist emergency response team was being coordinated with the Department of Health and Human Services, but as of March 1, responsibility for developing the team was transferred to the Department of Homeland Security.

Some states, regions and cities already have networks of emergency response health care professionals that can be called up and deployed in the event of an emergency, but these networks, while they may include pharmacists, are not made up strictly of pharmacists. And because they are not sanctioned federally, the pharmacists cannot help in any state where they do not have licenses.