 | The 131st Annual Meeting (November 15-19, 2003) of APHA |
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| The 131st Annual Meeting (November 15-19, 2003) of APHA |
Lisa D. Benton, MD, MPH and Robert Melton, MD, MPH. Division of Environental & Occupational Disease Control, California Division of Health Services, 1515 Clay Street, Suite 1700, Oakland, CA 94612, (510) 622-4453, lbenton@dhs.ca.gov
Incident Command System (ICS) is a well-recognized standard management and operations procedure for responding to emergencies, disasters, and terrorism amongst police, fire, emergency rescue, and environmental agencies. Historically, the role of public health agencies in the incident command model is often unclear or an afterthought. Because of our realization that public health departments play a role in disaster response from an event’s inception to conclusion and beyond, it is beneficial to better define the role of public health in the incident command paradigm. Enlightened incident command system frameworks, which proactively include public health agencies, facilitate their response to emergencies, disasters, and terrorism through inclusion of distinct public health functions. Inculcating public health agency collaboration into the incident command structure allows public health practitioners to establish protocols early for event investigation and surveillance either short or long term, and for providing on-scene technical assistance to clearly communicate health and safety risks to communities, emergency responders, and decontamination teams. Additionally, the public health agencies contribute uniquely to the surge capacity that local laboratories have for identifying unknown agents and biologic monitoring to determine safety or toxicity during contaminated site clean up. While the need for public health practitioners to master competency of the incident command system is crucial, it is our challenge to clearly articulate the distinct capabilities that public health agencies offer before, during, and after any terrorist event.
Learning Objectives:
Keywords: Environmental Health Hazards,
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.