Health-Related Core Capabilities
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists the following 15 core public-health emergency capabilities. A full discussion of these is found in "Public Health Preparedness Capabilities: National Standards for State and Local Planning, March 2011," posted at <www.cdc.gov/phpr/capabilities/DSLR_capabilities_July.pdf>.
Community Preparedness: Preparing to withstand and recover from public-health incidents.
Community Recovery: Collaborating with health care organizations, businesses, educational systems, emergency management officials, and others to plan and advocate for rebuilding public-health, medical, and mental/behavioral health services.
Emergency Operations Coordination: Establishing a standardized, scalable system of organization and supervision consistent with the National Incident Management System.
Emergency Public Information and Warning: Developing, coordinating, and disseminating information, alerts, warnings, and notifications to the public and to incident-management responders.
Fatality Management: Ensuring the proper recovery, handling, identification, transportation, tracking, storage, and disposal of human remains and personal effects; certifying causes of death; and facilitating access to mental/behavioral health services to the family members, responders, and survivors of an incident.
Information Sharing: Routinely sharing information as well as issuing public-health alerts to all levels of government and the private sector to prepare for and respond to events.
Mass Care: Addressing the public-health, medical, and mental/behavioral health needs of people affected by an incident at congregate locations.
Medical Countermeasure Dispensing: Providing medical countermeasures (like vaccines, antiviral drugs, antibiotics, and antitoxin) to treat or prevent disease.
Medical Material Management and Distribution: Acquiring, maintaining, transporting, distributing, and tracking medical material (like pharmaceuticals, gloves, masks, and ventilators).
Medical Surge: Providing adequate medical evaluation and care during events that exceed the limits of the normal medical infrastructure and rapidly returning operations to normal.
Nonpharmaceutical Interventions: The ability to recommend and implement strategies for controlling disease, injury, and exposure.
Public-Health Laboratory Testing: Conducting rapid and conventional detection, characterization, confirmatory testing, data reporting, investigative support, and laboratory networking to address actual or potential exposure to hazards.
Public-Health Surveillance and Epidemiological Investigation: Creating, maintaining, supporting, and strengthening routine health surveillance and detection systems and epidemiological investigation processes.
Responder Safety and Health: Protecting public-health-agency staff responding to an incident and supporting the health and safety needs of hospital and medical-facility personnel.
Volunteer Management: Coordinating identification, recruitment, credential verification, and training of volunteers to support the public-health response to incidents.
