Representatives from CRA's Health Preparedness Group presented an abstract entitled "Exercise Lessons Learned: Improving Public Health Capabilities for Emergency Planning, Preparedness, and Response". This abstract, selected from a large number of submissions, was judged to be of high quality and interest and was selected for a Poster presentation during the 134^th Annual American Public Health Association (APHA) Meeting & Exposition (November 4-8, 2006) held in Boston, MA for Developing Public Health Infrastructure to Address Acts of Bioterrorism and/or Pandemics held on November 7, 2006.

During the 2-hour session, the Exercise Lessons Learned: Improving Public Health Capabilities for Emergency Planning, Preparedness, and Response" poster was displayed in the exposition hall for viewing by the more than 10,000 APHA attendees.  The poster summarized and outlined exercise issues and lessons learned from CRA’s recent public health projects conducted for jurisdictions across the nation, including:

 

§   Department of Public Health:plan development, technical assistance, and exercises for SNS, risk communication, all-hazards, emergency communications, and pandemic influenza.

§   Public Health Preparedness planning, workshops, and exercises for Department Operations Center (DOC) response to pandemic influenza, other communicable disease outbreaks, and natural hazards.

§    Pandemic Influenza Tabletop exercises for evaluation of DOC and multi-day functional exercise for SNS and mass prophylaxis sites.

Along with the poster display, CRA’s Health Preparedness Group, were on-hand to discuss the presented information.  They invited the more than 100 viewers to contribute and discuss ideas or issues related to their own individual agency’s public health emergency preparedness and response operations. 

Please click HERE to download the Poster Presentation.