Topic:  Video chronicles the Katrina disaster recovery efforts of volunteers and students from the schools of Nursing and Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

Audience:  Appropriate for all ages. 

Length: 19 minutes

Preview Video:  Click here

Available: By download
 

Story Line: After the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina in the fall of 2005, it became obvious that the recovery work was going to take many years and many more resources than were readily available in the devastated areas.

So, in October of 2005, a group of faculty from the School of Nursing and the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill decided that an interdisciplinary service team of nursing and public health students and faculty could be a model for future disaster recovery efforts. And with that they began recruiting students, faculty, and volunteers for a trip to the Gulf Coast.

The trip was planned for spring break of 2006. The team learned that they would be staying in a Lutheran Disaster Relief sponsored tent camp and their task would be to staff several health clinics and to conduct a community assessment of safety messages from the MS Department of Health.

The North Carolina Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response was asked by the Mississippi State Health Department to help in preparing their Hurricane Katrina After Action Report. Staff from the NC Center for Public Health Preparedness along with the NC Public Health Regional Surveillance Team members from Greensboro conducted the training and supervised the collection of the data.

Also, a volunteer physician and several nurses from Chapel Hill, along with nursing faculty and nursing students, supplemented by nurse volunteers from other states, saw patients at three different clinics for 5 full days.

Finally, the physical devastation and destruction provided one other opportunity for our student/faculty volunteers. Groups of students, who had worked in clinics or had done surveys for several days, also worked doing clean-up and construction on some of the many small projects going on around the region

Gary Black, Health Communication Specialist with the Mecklenburg County Health Department, was invited by the UNC faculty to accompany the group and was able to document on video the nature of their work.

Katrina Spring, a 19 minute documentary short film, is the result of that effort.

This page is dedicated to the people of the Gulf states.