Health

Emergency Preparedness

Statewide Outcome(s):

The Office of Emergency Preparedness supports the following statewide outcome(s).

Minnesotans are healthy

People in Minnesota are safe.

Context:

The Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP) ensures local, tribal, and state public health and healthcare partners have the personnel, plans, training, communication tools and expertise to prevent or respond to public health emergencies, pandemic influenza, infectious disease outbreaks, bioterrorism, chemical exposures, natural disasters, and other incidents. This activity serves all residents of the State of Minnesota.

Emergencies are happening with increasing frequency, and the role of public health officials in response and recovery activities has expanded as emergency managers and other partners have observed the breadth of health issues and the capabilities of public health and healthcare partners.

The Office is responsible for continuity of operations planning, training and exercising to determine how to maintain facilities and reassign resources to support priority services identified by individual programs in the event of a business continuity interruption.

The Office of Emergency Preparedness is funded approximately 97 percent by federal grants and three percent from the general fund.

Strategies:

Examples of program efforts have included preparation for, response to, and recovery from the H1N1 pandemic influenza outbreak, seasonal flooding along the Red River, recent flash floods in Northeastern and Southeastern Minnesota, power interruptions, the Minneapolis tornado and other weather-related emergencies. OEP provides the infrastructure to support all other parts of the agency in protecting Minnesotans during emergencies, and in ensuring the ability of the department to continue operations should there be a loss of facilities, technology, or staff.

Effective and timely response and recovery requires coordination between public safety officials, healthcare providers, voluntary and non-profit organizations, public health officials at the federal, state, local and tribal level, multiple state agencies, elected officials, media organizations, and many others. This involves extensive planning, training, exercising, communication systems development, acquisition and replenishment of supplies, and administrative preparedness for legal and procurement issues.

The Office is responsible for development and maintenance of the Minnesota Department of Health’s All-Hazard Response and Recovery Plan and the MDH portion of the Minnesota Emergency Operations Plan so roles and responsibilities are clear to all responders.

Specific activities include development of and practicing plans for managing federal pharmaceutical and other supplies, updating statutes and regulations to assure needed authority for implementing emergency health measures, supporting a web-based system to monitor healthcare system capacity and support the rapid expansion of healthcare services in an emergency, and assuring compliance with requirements of grants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response of the Department of Health and Human Services.

In addition to the extensive coordinating role, the Office administers about $6 million in grants to community health boards and tribes, and about $5 million in grants to regional healthcare coalitions to build public health and health care preparedness statewide.

Results:

It is difficult to measure emergencies that don’t happen because people or systems were prepared, or disasters that weren’t as bad as they could have been because response was swift and effective, or people whose suffering from an emergency was lessened by work to build resilience. Efforts in preparedness, response, and recovery do, however, have some measureable indicators.

The number of times partners work together to develop, test, and improve their plans indicates coordination and improved capacity and capability. The Office conducts exercises with staff department-wide, and assists local, tribal, and healthcare partners with their exercise programs. Exercises follow a progression to build capability to respond to emergencies—moving from seminars, tabletop discussions, drills, and functional exercises to full-scale exercises. An important component is the after-action report and improvement plan, where the lessons learned are examined, modifications to plans or procedures are made, and components are re-tested in subsequent exercises. Local and Tribal Health Departments and Healthcare Coalitions submit exercise plans and After Action Reports to the Office to meet the federal grant requirements and allow MDH to learn and share best practices.

Minnesota’s Health Alert Network (HAN) connects the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, MDH, state agency partners, local health departments, and tribal governments by disseminating time sensitive health threat information when needed. Every local health department has developed a local HAN that they may use independently for local issues or to cascade on federal or state alerts to clinics, hospitals, long term care, specific medical providers, veterinarians, emergency managers and others within their jurisdictions. In addition to its use during major emergencies, HAN is used frequently to quickly distribute information throughout the state regarding food-borne and infectious disease outbreaks, and environmental health threats.

The Office coordinates recruitment and registration of Medical Reserve Corps volunteers through local chapters. The chapters conduct training and exercises to ensure the Medical Reserve Corps will be ready and able to respond to disasters by providing needed care and intervention services. Medical Reserve Corps volunteers include a wide variety of clinicians and support personnel—physicians, nurses, dentists, veterinarians, morticians, pharmacists, counselors, logistics experts, supply chain staff, etc. A critical feature of this program is to continually confirm that volunteers remain interested and eligible, and to increase their number. MDH also focuses on broadening the number of disciplines represented—for example, the recent collaboration with Environmental Health staff to add a Radiation Emergency Volunteers group to provide the specialty expertise of health physicists and others in the event of a large-scale radiological incident.

Performance Measures Notes:

Exercise data from Office tracking of state, local, and tribal

Health Alert Network data from MDH performance tracking database.

Medical Reserve Corps data from the Minnesota Responds Medical Reserve Corps database.

(All performance measures compare data from FY 2012 to FY 2013