CRISIS & PUBLIC HEALTHPublic-Health-Crisis Lessons from the Pandemic
“Just as the emergency department in a hospital is in a constant state of preparedness and response to the needs of their patients on an individual level - and on a mass casualty level in disasters - public health professionals in emergency preparedness are always at the ready to prepare for, drill, and respond to the community and the disasters that inevitably will affect it,” says UCLA’s Dr. Robert Kim-Farley.
In “Public Health Emergencies: Case Studies, Competencies, and Essential Services of Public Health,” published this month by Springer Publishing, Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health professor of epidemiology and community health sciences, writes that the pandemic offers the public, and public health specialists, ample lessons for the next public health crisis.
He answered questions by Brad Smith of the Fielding School.
Brad Smith: What are the lessons learned for crisis management from the pandemic (so far) for public health professionals?
Robert Kim-Farley: The ‘take-home lesson learned’ from the pandemic, and similar crises, is that no two disasters are the same, and that such forces as the increasing effects of climate change mean that the mix of emergencies will vary over time. There will always be the ‘expected-unexpected’ events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and we, in public health, need to be anticipating them, planning for them, stockpiling the needed supplies to address them – resources like the National Strategic Stockpile with medicines to counter bioterrorist attacks, personal protective equipment, ventilators, field hospitals, etc. - drilling on them, and responding to them.
Just as the emergency department in a hospital is in a constant state of preparedness and response to the needs of their patients on an individual level - and on a mass casualty level in disasters - public health professionals in emergency preparedness are always at the ready to prepare for, drill, and respond to the community and the disasters that inevitably will affect it.
Smith: What lesson can everyone take from the experience of the past two years?
Kim-Farley:We live in an inter-connected world, and has been said, `an infection anywhere can become an infection everywhere’ very quickly; no community in the world is more than a few hours or, at best, a days away from the next outbreak. Our public health services, locally, nationally, or globally, are as much first responders as fire and rescue or law enforcement – except the difference is public health crisis management has to be able respond not just locally, but on a national or even global scale.
