DHS Draft Mass Chemical Incident Patient Decon Guidance

Today the DHS Office of Health Affairs (OHA) published a notice in the Federal Register (79 FR 18570) announcing the publication of a draft of the “Patient Decontamination in a Mass Chemical Exposure Incident: National Planning Guidance for Communities”. OHA is seeking comments on the draft guidance.

The notice describes this draft document as:

This guidance document is developed for senior leaders, planners, incident commanders, emergency management personnel and trainers of local response organizations and health care facilities; it contains strategic-level, evidence-based best practices for use when planning and conducting patient decontamination in a mass chemical casualty event. The subject matter is focused on external decontamination of living people exposed to toxic industrial chemicals (TICs), toxic industrial materials (TIMs) or chemical warfare agents (CWAs) resulting from either an intentional or accidental release. 

Public comments are being solicited. Comments may be filed via the Federal eRulemaking Portal (www.Regulations.gov; Docket # DHS-2014-0012). Comments must be submitted by May 19, 2014.

Unfortunately, the notice does not provide a link to the guidance. There is nothing on the OHA web site. And there is nothing currently in the Regulations.gov docket. As I noted in an earlier blog post, there is an earlier limited-circulation draft document, but since this is almost two years old, I suspect that some changes have already probably been made.

NOTE: Updated 10:50 CDT 4-2-14 – A copy of the Draft is now available on the Regulations.gov site.

OMB Approves Notice for DHS Mass Chemical Incident Response Planning Guidance

Yesterday the OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs announced the approval ‘consistent with change’ of a document entitled “Patient Decontamination in a Mass Chemical Exposure Incident: National Planning Guidance for Communities” prepared by the DHS Office of the Secretary; presumably out of the Office of Health Affairs. There is not mention of this, however, on the OHA web site.

This document has not been listed in the Unified Agenda, but that is not unreasonable since this is not technically a regulatory action but a planning guidance document. I did note in August when this document was submitted to OIRA for review that an apparent bootleg copy of an earlier draft of this document is available on the EnMagine.com web site.

I expect that we will get to see an official copy of this document published in the next week or two.

DHS Sends Mass Casualty Decon Notice to OMB

The Office of Management and Budget announced Friday that the DHS Office of the Secretary submitted a new National Planning Guidance document to the OMB for pre-publication approval. The document concerns Patient Decontamination in a Mass Chemical Exposure Incident.

This document was not included in the Spring Unified Agenda so there is little official information available about the document. I did find an 2012 ‘Pre-Decisional Draft, Not for Distribution’ on Enmagine.com that might provide some interesting insight into what the document submitted to OMB might look like. It is a 107 page, pretty detailed and information dense document.

There are a couple of interesting items in the opening of 2012 document (all quotes from page 3). The most important to my mind is a comment regarding federal involvement (actually lack of federal involvement) in decontamination events:

“Due to the fast-acting nature of chemicals and the need for patients to be decontaminated as soon as possible, the federal government would not be able to participate directly in the response during the appropriate time window. Therefore, this guidance is directed primarily at local officials.”

The other item is a description of the scope of coverage for the guidance document:

“This guidance sets forth patient decontamination principles from a strategic perspective, rather than a tactical one. It is meant to guide, but not specify operational practices. The guidance is evidence-based to the extent possible and the evidence description, or lack thereof, is documented and briefly discussed.”

Finally there is a description of the types of incidents that this guidance document for which this guidance would be applicable:

“The subject matter considered here is limited to external contamination of living people in a mass casualty incident resulting from an accidental or intentional chemical release. Contamination of patients with chemicals, including toxic industrial chemicals, toxic industrial materials and chemical warfare agents, is the present focus. However, though not specifically addressed here, many of the concepts presented here will likely apply to radiological and biological agents.”

This looks like this will be a very interesting document to review when (if) it gets published in the coming months.