Rekindle the Fire

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears!

It is time to rekindle the fire, our motivation, for the response efforts of this summer have passed, and as our unit is in some "down time" this is an excellent opportunity to get back on track with some "old business". 

I am generally not one to dredge up the past, in the months before on the onset of the Pertussis Response efforts, our unit was in the middle of transition.

We were looking to the future, the future of our database and volunteer management systems we have in place.  We are fortunate here in Thurston County to have an excellent State of Washington Department of Health, with which we have been able to work very closely with.  Our contact (wow that sounds very Watergate-esque) at DOH has put a lot of work into a new program called WAserv (Washington State Emergency Registry of Volunteers).

To put it simply, WAserv will allow local system administrators (DOH) and volunteer managers (Your wonderful MRC Coordinators) to efficiently identify, activate, and deploy medical and support volunteers during disasters. It also functions as a communication tool for providing volunteers with information about training and exercises.

So far in the past, we have been using a variety of tools to accomplish what WAserv will in one convenient place. Around April of 2012 we had a large push to have our volunteers register on the site, and had a fairly successful time of it.

However, we have only had about 56% of our volunteer base register on the site.  it is our hopes to have all of our volunteers register on WAserv, as this will allow us to do a better job of serving you!  Trust me it will!  We have been involved in a myriad of work groups, exercise and trainings with Waserv to work out all the kinks, and have much better system to show for it

So I ask for all of you who are a member or a potential member to go here: https://www.waserv.org/ and register today!  If you already have an account, this might be a good time to log back in and update your information or to check out the changes that have occurred in the system.

I you have any questions, you can go here, or contact your MRC representative today!