Greene nurse completes FEMA training‏

Lewiston, Maine - Whitney S. Allen of Greene, a nurse educator at Central Maine Medical Center, has completed Center for Domestic Preparedness (CDP) training through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Based in Anniston, Ala., the CDP program provides advanced training for emergency response providers, emergency managers, and other government officials from state, local, and tribal governments. It is the only federally chartered Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) training facility in the nation.

The CDP offers training courses on incident management, mass casualty response, and emergency response to catastrophic natural disasters or terrorist acts. CDP resident training includes healthcare and public health courses at the Noble Training Facility, the nation's onlyhospital dedicated to training healthcare professionals in disaster preparedness and response. Training at the CDP campus is federally funded.

A number of training courses culminate at the CDP's Chemical, Ordnance, Biological and Radiological Training Facility, the nation's only resource featuring civilian training exercises in a true toxic environment using chemical agents. The training enables responders to effectively prevent, respond to, and recover from
real-world incidents involving hazardous materials.

Allen has worked as a registered nurse at Central Maine Medical Center for five years and presently serves as a clinical educator. She plans and instructs annual competency evaluations for nursing staff, assists with process improvement projects as needed, and provides safety training for clinical and nonclinical staff.

She is a member of Maine Task Force One in Lewiston, a multidisciplinary medical response team that supports local jurisdictions in enhancing and maintaining all hazards response capabilities to manage mass casualty incidents during the early hours critical to life-saving and population protection. The group provides medical support for large-scale regional disasters and mass casualty incidents.

She has participated in numerous emergency and mass casualty educational programs, as both a student and instructor, in Maine and on a national level.

Allen holds a bachelor’s degree in environmental biology from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of Southern Maine in Portland. She is a member of the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing.