Medical Reserve Corps Expansion

About the Program

Category: Risk and Emergency Management (Best in Category)

Year: 2023

At the beginning of Covid-19 the critical need for a larger workforce of volunteers was required to support the Maricopa County Department of Public Health (MCDPH). In response to support MCDPH efforts to combat Covid-19 in 2020-2022 the MCDPH Medical Reserve Corps (MRC) recruited and expanded from approximately 200 volunteers to well over 27,000 volunteers at its peak in 2021. The MCDPH MRC program currently in 2023 consists of over 12,000 registered volunteers, half medical and half non-medical. Some of the needs MCDPH MRC volunteers filled during the Covid-19 pandemic included rapid response deployment to support Points of Dispensing (POD), vaccine clinics, and serosurveys with thousands of MRC volunteer hours. This same MRC volunteer base would be ready to later in 2022 help during a novel MPXV outbreak by supporting months of vaccine clinics for MCDPH as vaccinators and clinic staff, while serving at-risk and underserved populations most effected by MPXV. In 2022 MRC volunteers responded to the first recorded case of dengue in Maricopa County by supporting field serosurveys and giving 82 hours of service. The unprecedented MCDPH adaptation to expand their workforce to meet 2020-2022 Covid-19 pandemic, MPXV, and dengue needs was vitally supported by the expansion of now one of the nation’s largest MRC units.