Federal healthcare workers are helping with the COVID-19 caseload in Alabama and the State wants more. A fourteen member Disaster Medical Assistance Team arrived at Foley Alabama South Baldwin Regional Medical Center last Friday. The so called DMAT team includes one doctor and seven registered nurses from out-of-state. Alabama is currently ranked fourth in the nation for new COVID cases. Scott Harris is the State Health Officer for Alabama. He says that securing federal help for Alabama is difficult due to multiple crises at home and abroad. “As you can imagine, everyone in the country is asking for this kind of assistance. We also have events going on in Afghanistan, events going on in Haiti, and there are federal resources deployed related to those events as well, so there’s just not a lot of extra capacity out there right now,” Harris observed.
South Baldwin Regional Medical Center has one hundred and twelve beds and a healthcare staff of nearly seven hundred. Jamey Durham is the State Department of Public Health’s Statewide Coordinator. He says that Alabama is requesting even more federal help for the State’s hospitals that aren’t that big. “We are looking at trying to bring federal resources in for smaller hospitals. There is a national medical EMS contract that we have initiated," said Durham. "There is a 15-person package. That has been sourced all the way to FEMA, has been approved, and again, just waiting on staff to be tasked to that mission.” Durham says that an additional DMAT team has also been approved and is waiting to be staffed. ADPH works with the Alabama Hospital Association to assign federal teams to locations that are in critical need.
