If you are looking for a meaningful way to serve your community, the Medical Reserve Corps (MRC) might be the perfect volunteer opportunity for you.
The MRC is an organization of licensed health care and medical professionals who can be called upon to assist in the response to large-scale health or medical emergencies and local public health events. The MRC is a national volunteer network, and the units are managed locally.
In 2021, the Clackamas, Multnomah, and Washington counties’ Medical Reserve Corps units partnered to form the Tri-County Medical Reserve Corps Collaborative. The units have jointly formed a centralized administrative, onboarding, and training process to improve cross-county coordination, increase volunteer opportunities, and streamline deployments. Each unit maintains its operational autonomy.
Who can join?
Anyone with a health or medical license (including alternative care) who is in good standing can join the MRC. Your license must be overseen by a state licensing board that conducts at least one criminal background check upon initial licensure.
To apply for unit membership with any of the tri-county units, please fill out the registration form with the State Emergency Registry of Volunteers in Oregon (SERV-OR). When you fill this form out, you also can join the State Managed Volunteer Pool (SMVP), which is the State of Oregon’s volunteer emergency response program.
Once you have completed the registration form, our staff will contact you within 10 business days. Once you have been confirmed as a volunteer, you will be assigned a Better Impact account to complete onboarding requirements and sign up for events.
Please note that the onboarding requirements take about two hours to complete. The deadline to complete the onboarding process is three months from when you are confirmed as a volunteer.
The onboarding requirements are listed below:
- Medical Reserve Corps Orientation (Video)
- HIPAA Review (Video)
- Bloodborne Pathogens (Training)
- OSHA Heat Illness Prevention (Training)
- Disability Training for Emergency Planners: Serving People with Disabilities
- Responder Resilience (Factsheet)
Opportunities to learn and serve
Volunteers can participate in a variety of emergency and non-emergency operations in the region, including:
- Outreach and Education: Engaging in outreach to the public to support community preparedness efforts, public health awareness campaigns, and other areas of interest.
- Teaching: Stop the Bleed, Fall Prevention for Seniors, Compression-Only CPR, CPR/AED certification, First Aid certification, Emergency Preparedness.
- Learning: Trainings including Basic Disaster Life Support, Advanced Disaster Life Support, Triage, Wilderness First Aid and many other exciting courses provided at no cost to our volunteers.
- Practicing: Setting up secondary and tertiary medical care for an extensive simulated disaster response exercise with area Community Emergency Response Teams.
- First Aid: Providing first aid services at community events such as Take a Soldier Fishing, Seattle to Portland Bike Event hosted by local nonprofit agencies.
- Serving: Staffing community reception centers, shelter or call center operations during emergencies helping partner agencies such as Medical Teams International (MTI), Community Emergency Response Teams (CERT), Red Cross and many others.
Questions?
Please contact our regional Medical Reserve Corps program specialist via email at [email protected].
We hope to see you soon!