Rural First Responders Bring Training Up to Speed

Domestic preparedness consortium boosts training for rural first responders

Published by: Govtech.com

Written by: Mike Curran / January 9, 2008

Most attention and much of the resources for all-hazards preparedness and response have been focused on urban areas. Enter the Rural Domestic Preparedness Consortium (RDPC), which was developed to ensure that rural first responders have a continuous resource for their training and preparedness needs. Its goal is also to ensure that rural first responders are up to speed on timely and relevant training and response information, as well as best practices.

And now, this consortium is preparing a series of Department of Homeland Security (DHS)-certified training courses for rural stakeholders that will be offered at no charge across the nation.

“Our country is still in a mode of concentrating training resources toward potential large-scale events that might occur in urban areas,” said Gary Wingrove, the chair of the advisory board to the RDPC and the manager of Government Relations and Strategic Affairs for Mayo Clinic Medical Transport in Buffalo, Minn. “The consortium is concentrating on creating curricula centered around the support role of rural responders to urban events, as well as an all-hazards approach more suited to rural communities for the more typical types of events we might be called upon to manage directly.”