Crisis Standards for Care and Staffing for Surge During COVID-19

Dan Hanfling is a Vice President, Technical Staff at In-Q-Tel, focused broadly on exploring the national security implications of epidemics and outbreak events. He previously served as a special advisor in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), focused chiefly on the National Healthcare Preparedness Program. He spent 18 years as principal consultant to the Inova Health System (Falls Church, VA) on matters related to emergency preparedness and response and was instrumental in founding one of the nation's first healthcare coalitions, the Northern Virginia Hospital Alliance, in October 2002. He also served as a contributing scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Health Security,

He is the co-chair of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine Forum on Medical and Public Health Preparedness for Catastrophic Events. During the COVID-19 response, he was appointed as a member to the National Academies Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats, for which he co-authored two rapid emergency consultations on the topic of crisis standards of care.

He is a medical team manager for the Fairfax County-based FEMA and USAID-sanctioned international urban search and rescue team (VATF-1, USA-1) and has responded to catastrophic disaster events across the globe. He is clinical professor of emergency medicine at George Washington University, and a Professor of Medical Education at the University of Virginia. He has been board certified in emergency medicine since 1997 and remains on staff in the Emergency Department of Inova Fairfax Hospital.

John L. Hick is a faculty emergency physician at Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC) and a Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School. He serves as the Associate Medical Director for Hennepin County Emergency Medical Services and Medical Director for Emergency Preparedness at HCMC. He is also Assistant Medical Director and Vice Chair of the Clinical Council for LifeLink III.

He served the Minnesota Department of Health as the Medical Director for the Office of Emergency Preparedness from 2002-2014 and currently works part-time for US Health and Human Services (HHS/ASPR) as an Advisor to the Director of the Office of Emergency Management.

He is an expert on hospital preparedness and crisis medical care issues and has published over fifty peer-reviewed papers dealing with hospital preparedness for contaminated casualties, disaster standards of care, and surge capacity.

John also has a strong interest in rotor-wing and fixed wing medical care and worked in 1998 for the Royal Flying Doctors Service in rural Queensland, Australia performing fixed-wing retrievals across a large area of outback Australia from the Mt. Isa base. He returned to Australia for six months in 2012 to work as a retrieval physician for the New South Wales helicopter service performing rescue and inter-facility responses.

In his spare time, he practices disaster mitigation, response, and recovery at home with his two daughters ages 14 and 17.

Tener Goodwin Veenema, PhD, MPH, MS, is a Contributing Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and a Professor of Nursing and Public Health in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. At the Center, she conducts, manages, and leads research projects to explore health systems optimization and healthcare worker protection during disasters and large-scale biological events. She also serves as an Associate Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Health Security (formerly Biosecurity and Bioterrorism). Dr. Veenema’s program of research focuses upon informing evidence-based policy related to health care systems and public health response for catastrophic events such as pandemics and radiation/nuclear disasters. She has conducted national workforce analyses evaluating emergency healthcare worker readiness and health systems coordination for disaster response in Ireland, Japan and the United States. Dr. Veenema is currently conducting studies addressing the use of personal protective equipment and the mental health burden on emergency healthcare providers during COVID-19. She is editor of Disaster Nursing and Emergency Preparedness for Chemical, Biological and Radiological Terrorism and Other Hazards, 4th Ed., the leading textbook in the field and developer of Disaster Nursing, a digital technology application (“App”) to provide decision support during disasters at the point of care. Dr. Veenema was awarded the Florence Nightingale Medal of Honor (International Red Crescent, 2013) the highest international award in Nursing for her professional service in disasters and public health emergencies. Dr. Veenema served as the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) 2017-18 Distinguished Nurse Scholar-in-Residence.