HBDHB takes part in Exercise Makgill

HBDHB takes part in Exercise Makgill – a national exercise to test pandemic preparedness

Hawke’s Bay District Health Board staff will be put through their paces tomorrow (Thursday 9 November) as they take part in Exercise Makgill, a 12-hour pandemic planning exercise coordinated by the Ministry of Health.

Every DHB in New Zealand will be taking part, and the exercise is focusing on the ‘Stamp it out’ stage of pandemic planning, where pandemic influenza is occurring in clusters in fictitious countries, towns and cities called ‘Badrash’ ‘Verisore’ ‘Hanglo’ and ‘Nupenj’.

The exercise is designed to test public health interventions, including surveillance, early detection and isolation of cases, the logistics of quarantining groups of patients, tracing contacts of cases and the allocation of antiviral medication. It will also test internal and external communications systems and the Coordinated Incident Management System used for response.

Hawke’s Bay will activate its Emergency Operations Centre from 8:00am tomorrow morning. Throughout the day the team will receive ‘injects’ of information from the Ministry of Health which will require a regional response.

Two further pandemic exercises are planned for next year: Exercise Russell in February 2007 and Exercise Cruickshank in May 2007.

ENDS

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