Building Community Resilience: Ensuring Emergency Preparedness. An MLA-MAC Plenary Presentation
by Cynthia Kahn, MILS, MPH, AHIP, Reference and Instruction staff of the George Washington University’s Himmelfarb Library
Georges C. Benjamin, MD, FACP, FACEP (Emeritus) addressed the Mid-Atlantic Chapter (MAC) of the Medical Library Association (MLA) at the MAC/MLA 2007 Annual Meeting on October 10, 2007. Dr. Benjamin has been the Executive Director of the American Public Health Association (APHA) since December 2002. Prior to his position at the APHA, he was secretary of the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, where he played a key role developing Maryland’s bioterrorism plan. His talk “Building Community Resilience: Ensuring Emergency Preparedness” built upon his years of experience in bioterrorism planning and public health.
Did you know?
- Most people are unprepared for a public health crisis & they know it
- Many people believe they are more prepared than they actually are (i.e. having a 3-day supply of food, water & medication)
- The term ‘public health crisis’ does not resonate with people. Yet they are concerned about events that could lead to one.
- Vulnerable populations are especially at risk for emergencies
Dr. Benjamin’s noted that you have to know what to be prepared for. While it seems like common sense, it is easier to say than to do. Public health leaders imagine what can go wrong, they try to anticipate events. How you train people, even highly trained, skilled workers, such as those in public health, for events that are unanticipated is the real question. Another way to think of it is that a disaster does not have to be disastrous.
“In a disaster, a resilient community should be able to mitigate the risks to individuals, families, and the community as a whole from preventable, serious health threats.”
There are five capacities of a resilient community, or needed to build a resilient community. They are planning, education, family/individual preparedness, public health response, and recovery. Planning, Benjamin related, is a process, not a point in time. He illustrated this point by showing that planning, i.e. writing a planning document, is fine, but typically no one knows what it says, or worse, what their role is. Therefore, community participation, drills and media engagement are essential.
Individuals and families have a responsibility. At present, only half have a three day supply of food, water & medication. Some aspects of individual and family involvement include having health insurance, learning how to get care and keeping medical records and immunizations up to date. Another facet is creating a family plan or a family emergency communication plan.
In addition to individual and family preparation, it is essential to build a resilient community. The community takes many forms from the individuals and family to businesses, schools and healthcare. Community response would include first responders, a core public health response, managing social disruption and continuing human services. For example, trash and sanitation are important. If the disaster was the flu, yet trash pick-up was disrupted, the community might develop plague in addition to the flu.
To address this issue, APHA is creating a national health movement to prepare individuals from preventable, serious health threats, called “Get Ready”. The first campaign is to ‘get ready’ for the flu. To learn more, take a look at the website http://www.getreadyforflu.org/newsite.htm and the blog http://www.getreadyforflu.blogspot.com/
