September is National Preparedness Month. Maine CDC’s Public
Health Emergency and Response (PHEP) team provides oversight and coordination
of all public health and medical response and recovery resources that are
required to reduce and/or prevent loss of life from an infectious disease
outbreak, a natural disaster, or an act of terrorism. This is accomplished by
activating and staffing the Public Health Emergency Operations Center, which is
the central nervous system for all response and recovery activities being
conducted by public health and healthcare responders.
In
between public health emergencies, the PHEP program is busy preparing for the
next emergency by updating emergency operations plans based on lessons learned,
facilitating the identification and prioritization of public health threats,
facilitating incident management training, developing and facilitating response
exercises among with partners statewide, managing response equipment and supply
caches, rotating and distributing medical countermeasures, testing emergency
communications equipment, and recruiting medical volunteers.
In
the past year, the Maine Responds coordinator has recruited 564 medical
volunteers, bringing our total number of deployable volunteers to more than 900
individuals. PHEP has developed six new Medical Reserve Corps Units; there is
now one in each of the eight public health districts. The Maine Health Alert
Network has the highest enrollment numbers (n=15,000) since implementing the
HAN system in 2007. PHEP also increased operational ability to safely transport
highly infectious disease patients to specialized healthcare facilities to
receive appropriate and specialized care.
