Technical Reports and Exercises

The following reports were prepared by RAND Corp. under contract to the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response.

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• Improving and Enhancing Telephone-based Disease Surveillance Systems in Local Health Departments (PDF – 192KB) (Word – 409KB)
• Enhancing Public Health Preparedness: Exercises, Exemplary Practices, and Lessons Learned, Phase III - Task G: Lessons Learned from the State and Local Public Health Response to Hurricane Katrina (PDF – 471KB) (Word – 663KB)
• Quality Improvement - Implications for Public Health Preparedness Describes how quality improvement methods can be used to improve emergency preparedness.
• Public Health Preparedness - Integrating Public Health and Hospital Preparedness Programs Examines models for coordination that have been employed by local health departments and general acute-care hospitals to improve public health preparedness.
• Organizing State and Local Health Departments for Public Health Preparedness Assesses whether there is a link between how state and local public health departments are organized and the level of their emergency preparedness.
• Tabletop Exercises for Pandemic Influenza Preparedness in Local Public Health Agencies Provides customizable tabletop exercises to test the relationships between local public health agencies and their local healthcare delivery and governmental partners in response to a pandemic flu emergency.
• Facilitated Look Backs - A New Quality Improvement Tool for Management of Routine Annual and Pandemic Influenza Describes a tool that public health agencies can adopt to regularly "look back" at each routine annual influenza season and draw lessons from for pandemic influenza preparedness activities.
• Enhancing Public Health Preparedness: Exercises, Exemplary Practices, and Lessons Learned (PDF - 1.3 MB) Assesses exercises for addressing local and state readiness for public health emergencies.
• Exemplary Practices in Public Health Preparedness (PDF - 279.95 KB) A resource for state and local public health departments.
• Learning From Experience: The Public Health Response to West Nile Virus, SARS, Monkeypox, and Hepatitis A Outbreaks in the United States (PDF - 958.74 KB) Assesses the quality of the public health response to four recent outbreaks.
• Test to Evaluate Public Health Disease Reporting Systems in Local Public Health Agencies (PDF - 678.29 KB) Standardized proficiency tests to aid in the development of regular and consistent strategies for testing public health disease reporting systems.
• Bioterrorism Preparedness Training and Assessment Exercises for Local Public Health Agencies (PDF - 897.49 KB) Tabletop exercises that focus on the public health response to a bioterrorism emergency.