Dr. Gaither: NDMS Supports Urban Search and Rescue Teams

The following is a text alternative description for the video Dr. Gaither: NDMS Supports Urban Search and Rescue Teams.

Josh Gaither, a Medical Officer with the National Disaster Medical System, is shown in his NDMS uniform. Dr. Gaither begins to speak and the video continues this way the entire time.

My name is Josh Gaither. I'm one of the doctors down here with the Health and Human Services Disaster Medical Assistance Team or DMAT for short.

Our team is a group of physicians nurses and paramedics with a breadth of experience in all kinds of health care settings. We do everything from emergency care to surgical and ICU care. Because of our breadth of experience, we have the ability to operate in a lot of different settings.

For this deployment, one of those possible settings is to deploy in support of the urban search and rescue teams operating along the coastline. Those teams do have medical resources; however, they're limited and our team, having a larger medical complement, can deploy to support those search and rescue teams should they encounter large groups of patients or patients with special needs that require additional care after they've been extracted from the hazardous environment that they've been caught in.

Produced at US taxpayer expense by the US Department of Health and Human Services.