Making U.S. health sector more resilient to major disasters
and incentivizes local grassroots and community-based organizations to become more involved in efforts to enhance the disaster resilience of the local health sector. This Culture of Resilience program would engage organizations traditionally not involved in health sector preparedness.
Create a network of disaster centers of excellence: Connect geographically distributed, large academic medical centers and designate them Disaster Resource Hospitals by setting rigorous standards, providing direct funding, and requiring accountability. These hospitals would be a source of remote, real-time clinical expertise, continuing education and training, and expertise for public health officials, among other benefits.
Increase support for healthcare coalitions (HCCs): Already successful healthcare coalitions comprising well-prepared hospitals, health departments, EMS providers, and emergency management need additional funding to engage other organizations inside the health sector (e.g., nursing homes) and outside the health sector (e.g., faith-based community groups) in preparedness work. HCC-led collaboration would then help integrate disaster resource hospital capabilities into preparedness and response for the overall coalition, and link community resilience efforts back to disaster research hospitals.
Designate a federal coordinator for catastrophic health event preparedness: Within the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) in the US Department of Health and Human Services, dedicate a group responsible only for preparing the nation for catastrophic health events. This group would coordinate existing decentralized healthcare preparedness initiatives in ASPR and provide a vision for strengthening preparedness in the future, with an increased focus on resilience.
“It is now widely recognized that resilience of communities and systems should be the goal rather than just preparedness,” the authors wrote in the report. “Resilient communities seek to resist the impact of disasters, recover promptly to normal operational capacity, and learn how better to withstand future events.”
The report concludes with policy requirements for each of these recommendations. There is opportunity for some of the requirements to be incorporated into the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act reauthorization this year.
“There needs to be more focus at the federal level, particularly on catastrophic health events,” Toner said at the Press Club evet,
JHCHS notes that to inform their work, the project team reviewed five years of published literature and conducted a series of working group meetings, a focus group, and interviews with more than forty subject matter experts and thought leaders.
— Read more in A Framework for Healthcare Disaster Resilience: A View to the Future (Center for Health Security, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, February 2018)
