In response to Hurricane Florence, the American Red Cross is implementing the Health Professionals Direct Deployment Process for volunteers to support Disaster Mental Health (DMH) and Disaster Health Services (DHS).
This initiative was incredibly successful during the 2016 and 2017 disaster seasons, resulting in over 6,000 new health and mental health volunteers applying for deployment through this program and over 450 new health and mental health volunteers being deployed. Those volunteers were essential to the ability to meet the needs of the clients in each operation they supported, and we are extremely grateful to you for your help in recruiting them.
As a reminder, through the Direct Deployment Process, professionals who are eligible to support Disaster Mental Health or Disaster Health Services (but who are not currently Red Cross volunteers) are able to deploy as Red Cross volunteers for the current response. The Red Cross will cover costs for their transportation, housing, food and incidentals while they are deployed. On-boarding and training will be provided before volunteers travel. We will do our best to match staffing needs with each volunteer’s availability but, of course, we cannot guarantee deployment within any one person’s available timeframe. Deployment is a minimum of 9 days with 7 days on the ground and two days travel (one day on each end).
Volunteer recruitment information can be found at:
