Bioterrorism and the role of advanced practice nurses

¶ … deficiencies in the state of Texas as represented with a score of 7. The will identify the three key indicators listed in the report that are reported as deficiencies for the state of Texas and relate them to first responder issues. In addition, we will examine the role of the clinical nurse leader/advanced practice nurse (APN/CNL) with regard to this and how such professionals will pick if the slack in the face of these deficiencies.

Bioterrorism Issues For Texas in Nursing First Response

In the eighth annual Ready or Not? Protecting the Public from Diseases, Disasters, and Bioterrorism report, the state of Texas achieved 7 of 10 key indicators of public health emergency preparedness. This reflects almost ten years of progress in improving the nations bioterrorism prevention, identification and containment of new disease and bioterrorism outbreaks/threats and the response to the aftermath of natural of September 11, 2001 and the anthrax attacks in Washington, D.C. The report however also notes that the progress is endangered by funding cutbacks for bioterrorism readiness. Luckily, Texas was only one of 8 states that have increased funding for bioterrorism readiness. Unfortunately, federal and local cuts jeopardize these gains with federal support for public health preparedness having been cut by 27% since FY 2005. Local public health departments have reported losing 23,000 jobs (15% percent of the local public health workers) since January 2008. This has been mitigated partially because of funding for public health communicable disease prevention due to supplemental funds that the state of Texas has received to support H1N1 pandemic flu response and from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The three deficient categories included incident response capacity problems, deficiencies in Emergency Operations Centers (EOCs) and foodborne disease detection and reporting ("Texas scored seven," 2011).

Such deficiencies, in particular with regard to EOCs could compromise the primary strength of the APN/CPL and their subordinates, namely their effectiveness as first responders. Particularly critical is communication during the first hours. This especially affects the response against category A agents like anthrax that are of a high priority. This is particularly ironic in light of the 2001 Washington anthrax attacks ("Communicating in the," 2007).

For this reason, the training of the APN/CPL as first responders is critical, particularly in the areas of teamwork and communication in a crisis zone. The APN/CPL professional knows this from firsthand experience in working in triage or emergency situations as first responders. In 2003 in an article in the journal Public Health Nursing a bulwark in the preparedness for a bioterrorism attack (Mondy, Cardenas & Avila, 2003, 424). While this journal article urges the expansion of training of first responders, we have noted the declining funding levels. We have also noted the importance of making use of other funding and training in the areas of disease prevention and that funding programs in other sectors can do double duty in the preparation for a bioterrorism emergency. Referring back to the Public Health Nursing article, it points out that the bioterrorism training was building upon the existing strengths of the PHN professional that they already possess (ibid). Therefore, this professionalism and basic competence in our core nursing duties should help us maintain the high level of preparedness that we now have in Texas and hopefully expand upon it.