The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene periodically asks health professionals in its Medical Reserve Corps to take part in role playing exercises. These trainings have two purposes: to familiarize these volunteers with the operation of a Point of Distribution (or POD) and to test the POD process itself.

The purpose of a POD is to make it possible to give mass treatment in response to a health emergency, whether it be a bioterrorist attack with an agent such as smallpox or anthrax or a natural pandemic.

These trainings tend to be somewhat chaotic. They’re large — usually with over 300 participants — and they model an emergency, an intervention that, by definition, needs to be done as quickly as possible.

DOHMH asked us to help prepare trainers by showing how noisy confusion at the beginning of the exercise resolves as volunteers learn how a POD works. In other words, the instructional objective for this video is affective: “Don’t worry. This will work.”