Several organizations in northeast Minnesota held a day-long workshop to encourage preparedness among members of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing communities. The health department and its emergency management partners conducted a mass dispensing site exercise that involved 8 activities: parking at one location, busing to the dispensing site, greeting, sorting/triaging, screening, medication/dispensing, questions, and busing back to the parking location. Participants also received an overview presentation on diagrams and role playing information for the exercise, along with background information on pandemic influenza. American Sign Language interpreters and real-time captioning augmented the verbal presentations. Participants also were given an emergency preparedness kit at the end of the day. The workshop demonstrates outreach to the deaf community, resulting in their participation in an emergency preparedness exercise. The practice represents an important step in including at-risk groups in the spectrum of pandemic influenza planning.
