New Emergency Preparedness Tools for Local Health Departments

The San Francisco Bay Area Advanced Practice Center, which represents a partnership between the San Francisco Department of Public Health and the UC Berkeley Center for Infectious Diseases and Emergency Readiness, recently launched two new emergency preparedness products for local health departments: the Infectious Disease Emergency Response (IDER) Toolkit and the Seasonal and Pandemic Influenza Vaccination Assessment (SPIVA) Toolkit.

The IDER Toolkit provides local health departments with guidance and templates that can be used to develop and operationalize a National Incident Management System-compliant response plan for infectious disease emergencies at the local level. It draws on extensive public health preparedness activities, experiences from the recent H1N1 outbreak, survey findings, and discussions with health departments throughout the country. The IDER Toolkit addresses unique features of an infectious disease emergency response, such as disease containment and epidemiology and surveillance, and includes modifiable organizational charts, job action sheets, and public health-specific Incident Command System forms.  

The SPIVA Toolkit gives an orientation to using community assessment methods as a tool for emergency preparedness. The SPIVA Toolkit provides an overview of how to use key informant interviews and focus groups to inform assessment activities, a step-by-step guide to designing and conducting effective vaccination surveys, a description of online tools and resources that may assist with data collection and analysis, and field-tested examples that show how other counties have implemented community assessments.

The IDER and SPIVA Toolkits are free and accessible online at www.sfbayapc.org. Help spread the word about these free resources for local health departments by posting one of our promotional web buttons on your personal page or organization’s website: http://sfbayapc.sfcdcp.org/button_gallery.

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