Risk, Politics, and Money: The Need for a Value-Based Model for Financing Public Health Preparedness and Response.

摘要

Our federal, state, and local governments are not investing in the design and improvement of strategies for evaluating the costs associated with natural and man-made disasters and events. In this era of fiscal conservatism, one of the biggest challenges in designing and funding public health preparedness is deciding exactly how much to invest and determining the impact of those investments. This thesis developed a rigorous scientific model to evaluate the benefit of using value-based tools to enhance the effectiveness of public health preparedness programs. The key question that framed this research was: Are public health departments that use value-based decision-making more likely to demonstrate and document higher levels of preparedness competencies? Although this research failed to demonstrate a statistically significant relationship between preparedness competency and value-based decision-making, there were some findings to indicate that VBDM may be useful in decisions that determine the financing of public health preparedness. The ability to analytically demonstrate the benefit of public health preparedness might prove beneficial in attracting additional public funding as well as private funding.