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Preparing the CDC Public Health Workforce for Emergency Response

  • Xiaohong M. Davis EMAIL logo , Edward N. Rouse and Chaunté Stampley
Published/Copyright: October 26, 2020

Abstract

A critical component of successful public health emergency responses is the availability of appropriate numbers of personnel with emergency response expertise. To achieve this, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) focused on strengthening training, personnel database systems, and responder outreach. To ensure availability of well-trained public health emergency responders, CDC and external partners coordinated training, planning, exercise, and evaluation activities; established the School of Preparedness and Emergency Response; and implemented Responder Training Tiers for response roles with defined functional competencies. For personnel information, CDC developed interoperable databases to streamline the search for specific staff expertise for a response. To improve responder outreach, CDC developed various mechanisms to efficiently identify and assign potential responders to responses. These measures work together to sustain a qualified workforce for public health emergencies, and may be helpful to other public health agencies for staffing and training of their response workforce.


Corresponding author: Xiaohong M. Davis, Ph.D., M.S., M.S., M.A., Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Center for Preparedness and Response, 1600 Clifton Road, MS H21-4, Atlanta, 30329, Georgia, USA, E-mail:

  1. Research funding: None declared.

  2. Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare no conflicts of interest regarding this article.

  3. Author contribution: All the authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this submitted manuscript and approved submission.

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Received: 2019-03-25
Accepted: 2020-10-01
Published Online: 2020-10-26

© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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