Enhancing Public Health Preparedness: Exercises, Exemplary Practices, and Lessons Learned. Assessing the Adequacy of Extant Exercises for Addressing Local and State Readiness for Public Health Emergencies. Technical Report

摘要

The use of emergency preparedness exercises is now widespread throughout the public health and responder communities. Exercises vary considerably in complexity and may be designed to meet one or more of a variety of objectives, including training, gap analysis, planning, and team building. Ideally, as with any quality improvement cycle, preparedness exercises are used to identify areas where improvement is needed; to inform the process of developing plans and procedures to improve performance; and finally to enable repeat testing once improvements have been made. This process is critical to achieving the long-term goal of conducting preparedness exercises in public health: to mitigate the morbidity, mortality, psychosocial stress, and social consequences of a terrorist attack or other public health emergency.