{"id":230744,"date":"2025-05-16T10:10:13","date_gmt":"2025-05-16T14:10:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=230744"},"modified":"2025-05-16T10:13:49","modified_gmt":"2025-05-16T14:13:49","slug":"disaster-response-master-and-apprentice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2025\/05\/disaster-response-master-and-apprentice\/","title":{"rendered":"Disaster Response: Master and Apprentice"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two UConn Health emergency medicine physicians are back from a medical mission in central Myanmar, which was devastated by a magnitude 7.7 earthquake March 28.<\/p>\n

\"Outdoor
Drs. Rob Fuller and Caroline Lloyd are back at UConn Health after being part of the International Medical Corps response to an earthquake that devastated Myanmar March 2025. (Photo by Chris DeFrancesco)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The earthquake and aftershocks are blamed for more than 3,700 dead and 5,000 injured, compounding the humanitarian crisis in a country already dealing with political unrest and an overwhelmed health care system.<\/p>\n

\u201cSuffice it to say that the external reporting is a 10x underestimate of the actual impact and fatalities,\u201d Dr. Rob Fuller<\/a> reported from the capital, Nay Pyi Taw, more than 150 miles from the epicenter. \u201cThere is much political difficulty in entering and moving here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fuller, who is UConn Health\u2019s chair of emergency medicine, and Dr. Caroline Lloyd<\/a>, in her second year in UConn\u2019s International Disaster Emergency Medicine Fellowship<\/a>, were part of an International Medical Corps response team. The IMC\u2019s response got off to a slow start, largely due to a reluctance by the Myanmar government to embrace assistance from foreign organizations.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere had been a smaller team from IMC trying for several weeks to open the door to allow us to come in and form those relationships, and assure the government we weren\u2019t going to do anything they didn\u2019t want us do to,\u201d Lloyd says.<\/p>\n

Myanmar is located in Southeast Asia\u2019s Indochinese Peninsula.<\/p>\n

\u201c[IMC] flew into Bangkok right after the earthquake, and it took days to get permission to enter the country,\u201d Fuller says. \u201cThen after they got into the country, they tried to get the ear of the minister of health to say, \u2018We\u2019re an aid-providing organization and we\u2019d like to collaborate with your responders,\u2019 and it took a long time to get those OKs. And then the minister of security and the minister of foreign affairs had to approve. By the time all those barriers were out of the way, we were one of only two foreign non-government organizations allowed in to provide some health care.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lloyd and Fuller didn\u2019t arrive until April 19, and by then the mission was to run a tent clinic in place of a key piece of health care infrastructure in Nay Pyi Taw that was lost to the quake.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were working at the site of a destroyed 300-bed hospital,\u201d Fuller says. \u201cWe were seeing about 100 patients per day. The patients were seeking care for acute and chronic conditions as well as injuries related to the earthquake.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Dr.
Dr. Rob Fuller, UConn Health\u2019s chair of emergency medicine, helps staff a tent clinic that replaced an earthquake-damaged hospital in Nay Pyi Taw, Myanmar. (International Medical Corps photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cIt was primarily handling outpatient care that they normally would have handled, with a smattering of patients sometimes popping in due to displacement or injuries that happened during the earthquake,\u201d Lloyd says. \u201cEvery once in a while you\u2019d get someone displaced by the additional conflict going on within the country, who had recently gotten out of that area and into this more-controlled governmental area. But overall, it was primarily outpatient. Lots of aches and pains.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lloyd served as a medical lead, overseeing clinic design, patient flow, and quality of care. Fuller says she was looking inward, to manage the clinic, while his role, as medical coordinator, was outward-looking, toward the community and other responding agencies.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t have to do a lot of it, because there weren\u2019t a lot of agencies to coordinate with, it was so controlled and closed,\u201d Fuller says. \u201cSo I just did what Caroline told me, and saw patients under her guidance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lloyd was there for a week, Fuller for two. They say the temperature was mostly in the triple digits.<\/p>\n

Fuller was part of a team from UConn Health that responded to Ground Zero on Sept. 11, 2001<\/a>. Since then, he has been part of IMC responses to disasters all over the world, including a tsunami in Indonesia, an earthquake in Haiti, a hurricane in St. Lucia and a typhoon in the Philippines.<\/p>\n

This was Lloyd\u2019s first overseas disaster response.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was in charge of staffing, the flow of how our tents worked, troubleshooting and changing things,\u201d she says. \u201cIf we were in an enclosed area, we can\u2019t have people who are coughing or have an infectious disease, how do we change our flow? They\u2019re putting them in a different area, but then no one\u2019s telling us that\u2019s happening, so let\u2019s have a discussion and fix that. Kind of the logistics of how it worked.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Three
Dr. Caroline Lloyd (left) and Dr. Rob Fuller (center) from UConn Health are among the American physicians who were part of the International Medical Corps response to the Spring 2025 earthquake in Myanmar. (International Medical Corps photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Lloyd says a physician who had done work with the IMC in Gaza told her this response was more complicated because of the controlling nature of Myanmar\u2019s government.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s one of those experiences where, now that you’re kind of removed and you can look back on it, you’re like, \u2018If this is how this worked in probably one of the most difficult situations I think you could imagine, man, what’s it going to be like to do it in an atmosphere where someone actually legitimately wants you there?\u2019 IMC has pallets and pallets of things that they have ready to come in; we couldn\u2019t get any of those,\u201d Lloyd says. \u201cThe government just didn\u2019t let them in.\u201d<\/p>\n

The experience comes as Lloyd nears completion of her disaster emergency medicine fellowship and her Master of Public Health studies. But she won\u2019t be gone from UConn Health for long; in August she\u2019s returning as a faculty physician.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was an opportunity for Caroline to be able to go into a disaster,\u201d Fuller says. \u201cEvery disaster\u2019s got its own problems and its own flavors. This is just one, but this very controlled political environment was probably the weirdest part about this one. We were controlled where we can go, and what we can do, and how we operate was very managed by the political entities that we were working with. But even so, we set up tents in what was a field, we used car-park areas with tarps around them to deliver care for a couple days. \u200aCaroline was in charge of the campus, so she designed how the patients moved from place to place and how we cared for them and where things were. So it was a great experience for her.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

UConn Health emergency medicine physicians Rob Fuller, Caroline Lloyd back from Myanmar earthquake aid mission<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":111,"featured_media":230736,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1715,1868,179],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2010],"class_list":["post-230744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-community-impact","category-meds","category-uconn-health"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-28 00:54:48","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/111"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230744"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":230764,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230744\/revisions\/230764"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/230736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230744"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=230744"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=230744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}