10 December 2014The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced the publication of the draft guidance
Patient Decontamination in a Mass Chemical Exposure Incident: National Planning Guidance for Communities in the Federal Register on April 2, 2014 for public comment. The public comment period for the draft guidance remained open until May 19, 2014. During the public comment period, we received 200 comments from 34 reviewers. The reviewers represented a broad cross-section of our intended target audience and roughly were divided into 1/3 individual reviewers from the response community including EMS, Fire/Hazmat, Hospitals and NG CST; 1/3 from academia and education and training centers; and 1/3 professional organizations.
Together, a multidisciplinary team from the Interagency Working Group reviewed each comment and determined by consensus to: 1) ACCEPT the proposed comment/edit; 2) PARTIALLY ACCEPT the proposed comment/edit; or 3) NOT ACCEPT the proposed comment/edit. 111/200 comments were ACCEPTED. In general, the comments accepted throughout the document primarily addressed clarification of points, added references or omissions to lists of examples, or provided insights to better illustrate a point. No substantial changes were made, altering any of the guidance statements themselves. In general, the comments NOT ACCEPTED were related to scoping of the project. Several other comments not accepted related to perceived promotion of products or services with vendors and were deemed out of the scope of this document.
