Champaign County Emergency Management Agency and the Champaign County Emergency Operations Center, conducted an emergency preparedness exercise that tested the campus's ability to distribute medication to masses of people during an infectious disease outbreak.
According to the scenario, Assembly Hall became a distribution site where asymptomatic students and faculty and staff members and their families, played by volunteers from across campus, went to pick up bottles of preventive medication.
About 40 volunteers posed as patients. They filed through the southeast corridor of Assembly Hall and completed forms with their medical information, then proceeded to the Assembly Hall's floor, where about 20 staff members from McKinley and the Public Health District dispensed medication from two lines of tables. An area was curtained off in the Assembly Hall's corridor for special needs populations unable to use the stairs to receive their medication.
Although the pill bottles were empty and ersatz forms were used, the exercise enabled officials to test the campus's ability to mobilize quickly, converting Assembly Hall from a recreational facility to a temporary dispensary within a couple of hours.
During a real emergency, the campus would be one of several distribution sites in the area, and the goal would be to get the entire community protected within 48 hours, said Dr. Robert D. Palinkas, the director of McKinley Health Center and one of the co-coordinators of the exercise.
"We would be trying to serve about 63,000 people - students and employees and their families - within 24 hours, running 24 hours a day," said Dr. David Lawrance, McKinley Health Center's medical director. "This would be part of the university's contribution to the distribution of the Strategic National Stockpile. It's part of the university's effort to show that it can take care of its own, and helps to offload the burden of distributing medications on the rest of the community."
Initially, the exercise was to have been part of a statewide drill; however, state officials bowed out to focus their efforts on the recent outbreak of the H1N1 virus. According to the Illinois Department of Public Health Web site, as of June 1, there were 1,448 confirmed cases and two probable cases in Illinois, but no confirmed cases in Champaign County or its surrounding counties. Nationwide, the H1N1 virus has spread to all 50 states and the District of Columbia, with more than 10,000 confirmed or probable cases nationwide and 17 deaths. Currently, there is no vaccine or medication available to combat the virus.
However, heightened concern about H1N1 prompted campus officials to proceed with the exercise, despite state officials' decision to cancel the statewide drill, Palinkas said.
"This is the second time that we've used the building (for a drill), and each time we do, we refine our plan a little bit," Palinkas said. "Our first goal was to see if we could do the physical setup in two hours and move our employees and assign them tasks. Our setup went very smoothly. We are now timing how quickly people go through the lines to estimate how rapidly McKinley could dispense medication if called upon."
Some volunteers filled out forms and filed through the dispensing lines as many as eight times during the approximate two-hour period that they were at Assembly Hall.
David Wells, a food service sanitation laborer in Dining Services, said that he volunteered because he was curious about what would happen in the event of an actual epidemic.
The campus conducted a similar exercise about three years ago. During a full-day exercise Assembly Hall was converted into a medication distribution center and Memorial Stadium into a mass-casualty treatment center.
However, in 2003, the university had to mobilize its resources for an actual disease outbreak, when a surge of meningitis cases at schools around the country prompted the vaccination of about 19,000 students at the UI Armory, Palinkas said.
Additional exercises will be conducted to ensure that the UI is prepared to handle such crises, said Todd Short, director of emergency planning in the Division of Public Safety, who co-coordinated the exercise. "We won't shelve our plan just because we've done it once. Our emergency planning functionality can only be measured by these exercises."