Emergency Response Plan
Emergence preparedness is a critical aspect for any organization or country that prioritizes safety. Strengthening preparedness system involves planning to prevent a company or a nation’s infrastructure and essential sectors major disasters, terrorist attacks, and other emergencies that might arise. Emergency planning also ensures that affected organizations can efficiently respond to disasters and recover from attacks and disastrous events.
The article assesses the need to enhance preparedness and emergency response, especially in the healthcare sector. Emergency planning forms the basis for preparedness, which is a vital aspect of emergency response. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has identified various knowledge gaps in the public health systems’ preparedness and emergency response. CDC recommends that the healthcare sector needs to make emergency response a priority during policy-making.
The healthcare industry is a sector that is at risk of multiple disasters, including pandemics that hit when no one is aware and cyberattacks that currently pose significant challenges in the this industry. However, CDC has emphasized that preparedness and emergency response is a collective role that should include the private and public sectors, despite the industry. One of the measures to ensuring effective emergency preparedness and response in the healthcare sector outlined in the articles is Preparedness and Emergency Response Research Centers (PERRCs) (Leinhos, Qari, & Williams-Johnson, 2014). These centers are accredited to most public health schools in the United States. The centers focus on enhancing the usefulness of public health preparedness and response training, creating sustainable response systems, improve communication in response systems, and identify criteria to improve response systems for all hazards. Adopting such centers and response systems can help organizations prepare against various types of risks that can be caused by either natural or human-made disasters. Response systems should also ensure information in targeted organizations is secure or is retrieved easily through backup systems.
References
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (US) Public health preparedness capabilities:
national standards for state and local planning. March 2011 [cited 2014 Jul 24] Available
from: URL: http://www.cdc.gov/phpr/capabilities/DSLR_capabilities_July.pdf.
Leinhos, M., Qari, S. H., & Williams-Johnson, M. (2014). Preparedness and emergency response
research centers: using a public health systems approach to improve all-hazards
preparedness and response. Public health reports (Washington, D.C.: 1974), 129 Suppl
4(Suppl 4), 8–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/00333549141296S403