Surge planning – especially immediate bed availability – is essential to emergency planning and response.The resources in this Topic Collection highlight case studies, lessons learned, tools, and promising practices for planning and improving capabilities for a surge event.
This resource, developed by the US CDC for community planners, is a tool to explore the role of emergency medical services (EMS) in medical surge planning and to examine the need to supplement existing guidance on integrating EMS into community preparedness plans.
This planning guide from New York City Health + Hospitals provides high-level planning information for frontline hospital multidisciplinary teams to support planning and training for the initial care of suspected special pathogen patients while determining whether and when they will be transferred to another facility for further assessment and treatment.
A free, online collection of public health tools. Modules include administrative preparedness, communications, community resilience, epidemiology, immunizations, infectious disease prevention and control, influenza, medical countermeasures, pharmacy partnerships, preparedness, public engagement, and vector control.
This 90-minute webinar shares information on how public health officials are using existing EDRS for active disaster response and surveillance and will cover EDRS’ role in mass fatality planning. Speakers from Oklahoma, New York City, and Alabama health departments recount their first-hand experiences with disaster response in their jurisdictions. A conceptual framework to leverage EDRS and other available databases to develop an electronic national disaster mortality surveillance system is also presented.
New York City Health & Hospitals Mystery Patient Exercise Plan
The Exercise Plan serves as a template to support health care delivery sites for highly infectious disease preparedness and response through exercises. This exercise was developed by the NYC Health & Hospitals, Special Pathogens Program to provide exercise participants with the necessary tools to conduct Mystery Patient Drills and the flexibility to adapt the exercise to the individualized needs of each facility and varied composition of each local community. Materials include the Exercise Plan, Appendix I, and Appendix J.
The speakers in this 17-minute video developed by NACCHO share how local health departments can use social media platforms (e.g., Facebook) to identify infectious disease outbreaks in communities, allowing them to address potential threats communicate with residents in a timely fashion.
This U.S. CDC guide was created for state and local jurisdictions to use to better organize their work, plan their priorities, and decide which capabilities they have the resources to build or sustain. The capabilities also help ensure that federal preparedness funds are directed to priority areas within individual jurisdictions. CDC applied a systematic approach to developing the public health preparedness capabilities. The content of the guide is based on evidence-informed documents, relevant preparedness literature, and subject matter expertise gathered from across the federal government and the state and local practice community.
This document is a summary of 16 key research and game findings focused specifically on the characteristics of civil-military response to a pandemic scenario in an urban environment. While these findings are not definitive or complete, they could contribute to improving civilian and military effectiveness in humanitarian assistance and disaster response operations.
