DC recruits Medical Reserve Corps volunteers to support health care workers during pandemic

Mayor Muriel Bowser is looking for volunteers to take some of the pressure off front-line health care workers amid a rising count of COVID-19 cases in DC and increasingly aggressive steps by the District government to curb the outbreak.

Volunteers in the DC Medical Reserve Corps (MRC) receive free training to provide “medical screening and support in mass care settings,” among other tasks, according to a press release from the mayor’s office. 

Volunteers must be 18 years or older, but do not need to be medical professionals. Actively seeking non-professionals is a major change for the DC MRC, said Dr. Krishnan Narasimhan, president-elect of the DC Academy of Family Physicians, practicing physician at Howard University Hospital and associate professor at the university’s College of Medicine. In the past, he said, recruitment for the volunteer corps has mostly been targeted at health care professionals. 

“We need capacity,” he added, both in terms of hospital beds and workers to handle the “sheer mountain of other work” that a surge of coronavirus patients could bring.

At a time when replacements are not readily available for any doctors who themselves get sick, “having a functional, full-fledged reserve corps would really help,” Narasimhan said. 

Kishan Putta, an advisory neighborhood commissioner in Burleith and a contender for the vacant Ward 2 DC Council seat, wrote on Twitter soon after recruitment began last month that he had signed up for the reserve corps.

“Whether they need me in person to help with things on the ground or if they need admin help on the computer, I’m here to do whatever they need,” Putta said in an interview. 

On March 21, when the recruitment effort began, the DC corps had 600 members, two-thirds of whom were medical professionals, according to a tweet from Bowser. More than 3,500 people have applied as of yesterday, DC Department of Health director Dr. LaQuandra Nesbitt told The DC Line. 

The mayor’s press release announcing the call for volunteers said they might work at sites such as the National Mall, a District recreation center or shelter, or public health sites. Volunteers may be called on to help track patients at planned events, distribute medical countermeasures, or assist at public health activities. 

Narasimhan highlighted three areas for the DC government to focus on in its response to the coronavirus outbreak: procuring health equipment, identifying sites for patient overflow and quarantine, and most important, preparing for a rapid increase in the number of cases. 

“The No. 1 priority is that we have to anticipate the surge and build capacity,” Narasimhan said. “This is a scale unlike we’ve ever seen.”

The Medical Reserve Corps will be most effective in handling the third objective, Narasimhan said, by providing a backup pool of workers to take the pressure off medical professionals on the front lines. 

The move by the DC government follows similar calls made by the governments of Maryland and Virginia for volunteers. DC’s Medical Reserve Corps is part of the National Medical Reserve Corps, a network of local volunteer groups with about 180,000 members. The Medical Reserve Corps grew out of the USA Freedom Corps, a volunteer organization created by President George W. Bush in 2002 in response to the 9/11 attacks. Since then, over 860 local community groups have formed within the network.

For medical workers like Narasimhan, the presence of the corps offers the security of knowing there is a second line of defense, he said. “We know we need teams of people behind us.”