Throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic, Medical Reserve Corps (MRC) units have been adapting and supporting an unprecedented number and type of responses. Many units are using NACCHO’s mission set template to plan and document those response types.

The term ‘mission set’ is a planning document that describes a scalable response and recovery capability for MRC units and volunteers that is organized, developed, trained, and exercised prior to an emergency or disaster for local, state, and/or regional deployment purposes. The MRC mission set template is available to download here.

Mission Sets include the following and more:

• Personnel and equipment requirements
• Training requirements
• Deployment Timeline
• Pre-planning considerations

Mission Sets can be used to:

• Document existing response missions
• Plan new response missions
• Train volunteers or specialized teams
• Share unit capabilities with partners

In response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, NACCHO awarded 2020 COVID-19 Operational Readiness Awards (ORA) to 32 MRC units to develop COVID-19 response specific mission sets. These mission sets cover a range of topics and serve as a resource and template for other units considering these types of missions during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Examples of some of the mission sets developed are listed below and available for download on the NACCHO MRC website. Sample mission sets collected from COVID-19 ORA awardees are also now available in the new MRC Fact Sheet: COVID-19 Mission Sets for Emergency Response.

• San Bernardino County MRC (Unit #47) developed a COVID-19 Code Triage Response Mission Set to provide rapid triage response to decompress ER visits at hospitals surging with patient volumes.
• Loudoun County MRC (Unit #165) developed a Covid-19 Micro Mobile SARS-COV-2 Diagnostic Testing mission set. Teams are designed to go door-to-door, primarily in apartment complex’s, with a focus on providing testing to medically underserved communities.
• Lake County MRC (Unit #273) developed a mission set to support non-medical isolation rooms in schools. The mission provides schools with supervision for identified students who have been determined by school staff to have developed symptoms while at school and fit the criteria for suspected cases of COVID-19. It allows for identified students to be isolated away from other students until their parents or legal guardians can pick them up.
• Wachusett Medical Reserve Corps (Unit #437), created an Emergency Communication and Messaging mission set. This enables volunteers to serve as the conduit for information to internal and external stakeholders, including staff, visitors and families, and the news media, as approved by the Incident Commander.
• Yates County MRC (Unit #1379) developed an MRC Point of Dispensing (POD) support mission set. The mission set includes two operational choices: drive-thru or traditional with the addition of social distancing.
• Johnson County MRC (Unit #2277) created a COVID-19 Drive-Thru Vaccination POD mission set. This prepared the unit to set up a Closed/Open Points of Dispensing site to vaccinate critical populations with MRC members involved in both medical and non-medical job roles. This mission set template is flexible to be scaled up or down dependent on the type of POD and number of vaccine recipients.