February 18: Interview with HSToday Mission Award Winner Doris Brown

February 18: Interview with HSToday Mission Award Winner Doris Brown

HSToday will be interviewing Doris Brown on February 18th at 3pm EST about her recent Mission Award for her work during the Coronavirus response. Doris Gray Brown has been a registered nurse for 45 years and has nearly 40 years of experience in public health nursing, education and health care administration. As Executive Director for Community Preparedness at the Louisiana Department of Health, she provides oversight for several public health programs within Emergency Preparedness & Response (Emergency Operations Center, Pandemic Flu, Cities Readiness Initiative, Strategic National Stockpile, Medical Social Services, Community Outreach, Emergency Systems for Advanced Registration of Volunteer Health Professionals and Workforce Development).

Prior to this appointment, Brown served as Chief Public Health Nurse and Administrator for the Office of Public Health (OPH) Continuing Education Unit. In this role, she was responsible for the overall direction and administration of the total public health nursing component for the Office of Public Health, which encompassed over 40 programs and the supervision of over 330 public health nurses statewide. As administrator for the OPH Continuing Education Unit she was responsible for the direct supervision of nursing contact hours and medical education credits for physicians. The OPH Continuing Education Unit is nationally accredited by the American Nurses Credentialing Center Commission on Accreditation (ANCC) and the Louisiana State Medical Society (LSMS).

During the past several years, Brown has been instrumental in meeting the planning and training needs of the Louisiana Department of Health (LDH) emergency preparedness efforts. Brown has been on the forefront of preparedness, response and recovery efforts for natural and manmade disasters, serving as part of the Unified Command Staff for LDH/OPH.

In 2020, Brown has served as LDH Emergency Operations Center (EOC) Incident Commander for numerous declared emergencies in Louisiana, including COVID-19, Hurricane Laura, Hurricane Marco, Hurricane Sally, Hurricane Delta, and Tropical Storm Zeta. Each of these declarations resulted in an EOC activation. The LDH EOC has been fully activated since March 2020 in response to COVID-19 (partially activated since January 2020). As hurricanes have threatened the state, dual incident activations have occurred. Under Doris’s leadership, LDH has sheltered nearly 500 COVID-19 positive residents in a medical monitoring station, an additional nearly 500 COVID-19 positive residents in isolation sites, and approximately 200 in medical special needs shelters due to hurricanes. Through the LDH EOC, nearly 6,000 PPE requests have been fulfilled for health providers, resulting in over 47 million units of PPE distributed. Additionally, LDH EOC has met the demands of 134,191 callers through collaboration with the statewide 211 call center answering questions related to COVID-19 and hurricane response.

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