Robin Armstrong wrote:As our hospital participates in more disaster drills our Department of Emergency Services is recruiting more community members to participate as volunteers.  At this point they are of the opinion they do not have to be processed as volunteers and of course I see them as volunteers because they are performing a non paid function at our hosptial.  At this time they are not signing confidentiality forms, liability releases or anything else.  Please advise me how you handle disaster drill volunteers.

When we do community wide drills, we use students in the paramedic program from the local junior college.  They have been through a lot of training and make great victims.  If the area high school has a health occupations program, those students would make good victims also. It would be a great opportunity to expose them to the hospital b/c most of them come through for clinical rotations anyway.  If we are just doing the drill in house we only use our adult and teen volunteers.