Massachusetts public health emergency response: public health crisis response - the mission of the massachusetts department of public health (DPH) is to prevent illness, injury, and premature death,…

Massachusetts public health emergency response: public health crisis response - the mission of the massachusetts department of public health (DPH) is to prevent illness, injury, and premature death, to ensure access to high quality public health and healthcare services, and to promote wellness and health equity for all people in the commonwealth. In support of this mission, DPH responds to public health and healthcare impacts resulting from a variety of incidents or events. DPH and its office of preparedness and emergency management (opem) work effectively with all partners to plan for and support responses to and recovery from all hazards that impact public health, striving to ensure that commonwealth residents can prepare for, respond to, recover from, and mitigate public health emergencies, emergencies that affect their health and welfare. The department has strong relationships with local public health and healthcare organizations in massachusetts and provides support to them for planning and response to public health emergencies. This application is based on an emerging infectious disease (EID) outbreak. In the event of such a public health emergency, DPH will seek to rapidly mobilize resources to respond to the surge needs of existing public health and healthcare preparedness programs in massachusetts. Massachusetts will achieve the following short-term outcomes during the project period to create a better prepared nation for public health emergencies: • prioritized public health services and resources sustained throughout all phases of emergencies and incidents. • earliest possible activation and management of emergency operations. • timely communication of risk and essential elements of information. • timely implementation of intervention and control measures. • timely coordination and support of response activities with partners. • earliest possible identification and investigation of an incident. • continuous learning and improvements contain real-time feedback loop. Opem will continue to work closely with the DPH bureau of infectious disease and laboratory sciences to ensure the department's strategies and activities will strengthen the following domains and include outputs that lead to strong deliverables targeted to the achievement of the overall outcomes: jurisdictional resilience, incident management for early crisis response, information management, countermeasures and mitigation, surge management, and biosurveillance.