PUBLIC HEALTHUpward and Onward: 2025 Preparedness Summit
Public health preparedness in the United States has always had to learn on its feet. It was abruptly brought into the spotlight by the 2001 anthrax attacks and given a national security imperative.
Earlier this year, in April, I had the opportunity to attend the National Association of County and City Health Officials’ (NACCHO) 2025 Preparedness Summit. While in past years, it was consistently held in Atlanta, Georgia, in recent years it has begun to move around the country. This year, it was held in San Antonio, Texas – and for those interested, next year, it will be closer to George Mason territory, up in Baltimore, Maryland from April 13-16, 2026.
First held in 2007, NACCHO’s Preparedness Summit, also known as ‘Prep Summit,’ is an annual national conference for all professionals with equities in public health preparedness, be it from healthcare, public health, or emergency management. It has grown steadily over the years and remains a premier space for these professionals to meet, network, present research findings, and grow from each other’s experiences and lessons learned.
I myself first attended the Preparedness Summit in 2022. At the time, I was working in public health, for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO), which can be considered a ‘sister’ organization to NACCHO and is regularly represented on the organizing committee. As most people may recall, the COVID-19 pandemic was still very much an ongoing crisis during the spring of 2022, and you could feel it in every single attendee that year. Attendees were still masked and closely following policies to mitigate the spread of the virus; staff from state and local public health agencies were at the end of their ropes trying to work with what resources they had; healthcare professionals were all sleep-deprived from working practically 24/7; federal employees were countering waves of mis/disinformation and verbal battering from the public, et cetera, et cetera. In the following years, as I continued to attend for work (2023) and school (2024), I continued to also hear and palpably feel the dismay emanating from my public health colleagues.
And yet, with everything still happening in the world, this year finally felt like something had changed – perhaps, just slightly, in a more hopeful direction.
The theme of this year’s Prep Summit was “Pathways to Recovery in the Aftermath of Disasters.” Through my time at the summit, I noticed three additional sub-themes.
