Healthcare Preparedness Update

Working toward integration of Public Health, Healthcare, and Emergency Management to strengthen Healthcare Preparedness, Health Security, and Community Resilience

CDC's Healthcare Preparedness Activity (HPA) – Who are we?

HPA within the Division of Strategic National Stockpile (DSNS) at CDC works to improve the healthcare delivery system's all-hazards preparedness response to public health threats. HPA collaborates with other federal agencies, state governments, medical societies, and other public and private organizations to promote integrated healthcare preparedness and medical counter-measures planning. HPA has engaged with multiple communities to explore how they can develop plans that address a large surge of patients on the healthcare system during a public health emergency. Operational tools and other resources are being developed based on HPA's engagement with public health, healthcare, and emergency management partners. HPA continues to work toward identifying needs for healthcare planning at the community level.

For more information, visit http://www.cdc.gov/phpr/healthcare/index.htm.

Hospital Executives and Disasters Stakeholder Meeting

HPA hosted Hospital Executives and Disasters: A Stakeholder Meeting on November 5, 2013, at the CDC Global Communications Center in Atlanta. Meeting attendees included hospital executives, federal government stakeholders, and representatives from national public health and healthcare organizations. The purpose of the meeting was to share lessons learned and identify practical and feasible steps that hospital executives can take to increase their organizations' emergency preparedness and business continuity capabilities. Morning sessions featured presentations from hospital executives who have led their organizations through disaster responses including an anthrax outbreak, Hurricane Sandy, and the Joplin, Missouri tornado. Closed afternoon work sessions were used to develop resources and tools aimed at increasing healthcare executives'engagement in emergency preparedness.

For more information, contact Dr. Dahna Batts at dbatts@cdc.gov or 404-639-2485.

2014 Preparedness Summit: Rural Workshop Session

In April 2013, HPA partnered with the rural community of Howard County, Nebraska, to address healthcare system surges during public health emergencies. The resulting Planning Workshop for Addressing Healthcare Surge in Rural Settings engaged local public health, healthcare, and emergency management partners.

At the 2014 NACCHO Preparedness Summit, HPA and Howard County conducted a 90-minute learning session. The session highlighted successes and challenges in building community partnerships within rural communities that are faced with public health emergency healthcare surges.

The goal of the session was to have other rural communities benefit from the hard work and products developed from the workshop. Attendees were encouraged to discuss issues within their own communities that inhibit the engagement of partners and possible solutions for improving coordination and integration of planning efforts. Presenters included Kelly Dickinson, CDC-HPA; Randy Boltz, Howard County; and Sharon Medcalf, Center for Preparedness Education.

For more information on the summit, visithttp://preparednesssummit.org/.

For more information on this project, please contact Kelly Dickinson at kdickinson@cdc.gov or 404-639-2715.

Resource Spotlight: Community Assessment Tool (CAT)

The CAT is a planning tool developed by HPAfor a community to assess its healthcare system readiness for a disaster.

The CAT helps to reveal each core agency partners' capabilities and resources, highlights problems such as overlapping or competing supply order to the same vendor, and addresses gaps in the community's capabilities or potential resource shortages.

To access CDC-HPA's Community Assessment Tool (CAT), go tohttp://www.cdc.gov/phpr/healthcare/communities.htm.

DOWN

1. CDC's Healthcare ___________ Activity

2. A meeting at which a group of people engage in intensive discussion and activity on a particular subject or project

3. The ongoing, systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of health data

ACROSS

4. A person who is among those responsible for going immediately to the scene of an accident or emergency to provide assistance

5. Any incident or event, natural or human caused, that requires an organized response by a public, private, and/or governmental entity in order to protect life, public health and safety, values to be protected, and to minimize any disruption of governmental, social, and economic services

6. A sudden rush of patients

7. The novel influenza virus responsible for the 2009 pandemic

8. The act of cooperating with an agency or instrumentality with which one is not immediately connected

9. This provides the mechanism for coordinated federal assistance to supplement state, tribal, and local resources in response to public health or medical situations

10. A supply of resources stored for future use