Medical Reserve Corps

And so there are a bunch of volunteer organizations out there.

Um, I manage a Medical Reserve Corps unit, um, which focuses on public health emergencies.

But there's a wide things that the volunteer group prepares for, and so looking up Medical Reserve Corps, MRC.

Within Virginia, there are units all across the state.

There's other groups out there as well, CERT, community emer- uh, community emergency response teams, and the Red Cross as well.

So if you're looking to volunteer, if you feel like you're readily prepared or wanna learn more, um, definitely take a look into some of those organizations, and that might be a great opportunity to serve others when things go wrong.

Well, I know the, the Medical Reserve Corps has been invaluable in s- in so many times for, for you over the years.

Definitely, yes.

There was a lot of mobile clinics, uh, off-site clinics, and points of dispensing that public health did, and we kind of thank them for staying out on the field, um, almost every day.

And, um, they were also aided by the Medical Reserve Corps.

We do have a unit here in the CNMI, and, um, they were out with a lot of different partners, um, to provide support and help to the community.

I'll just, uh, add a few, uh, on, on what Pat had mentioned.

Some of them have been internationally.

Some of them have been, as I mentioned, with local organizations such as the Medical Reserve Corps.

There are many volunteer opportunities.

And so I want people to understand that if you're interested in disaster nursing or disaster medicine, You don't have to belong to an organized federal group.

And we kept talking to people and kept getting bumped upstairs.

And pretty soon we were talking to folks at the White House and President Bush ended up embracing our proposal to create what became the Medical Reserve Corps program.

And I was scheduled to go and begin my oncology fellowship at Duke in July of 2002.

And I was invited to come to Washington to help set up this program in the Office of the Surgeon General.