Because natural and manmade disasters can occur at any time, individuals, communities, and governments must be prepared. RAND has developed guidelines for individual preparedness in response to terrorist attacks; evaluated, modeled, and enhanced preparedness policy options for government officials at all levels; and recommended actions that communities should take to prepare for bioterrorist attacks, pandemic flu outbreaks, and other large-scale emergencies.
The Cities Readiness Initiative (CRI) aims to improve communities' ability to rapidly provide life-saving medications during public health emergencies. The authors examine (1) the status of communities' operational capability to meet the goal of delivering medical countermeasures within 48 hours of a federal decision to deploy assets and (2) whether there is evidence that CRI has improved communities' capability to meet that goal.
The study reports on the evidence and potential for use of 'emergency readmissions within 28 days of discharge from hospital' as an indicator within the NHS Outcomes Framework, drawing on a rapid review of systematic reviews.
This documented briefing presents the results of a rapid review of the funding landscape for complex trauma research in the UK. Recommendations are made about how to strengthen this niche and orphan area of research.
Communities can build resilience to disasters through efforts such as joint planning of government and non-governmental organizations and the development of community networks.
Law enforcement agencies in areas where terrorist threats are considered to be high have expanded their focus beyond traditional crime prevention and investigation to include counterterrorism and homeland security operations.
This report describes a method for modeling an emergency response system; identifying how individual parts of the system might fail; and assessing the likelihood of each failure and the severity of its effects on the overall response effort.
This report describes the current policy context for domestic all-hazards risk-informed capabilities-based planning by local military and civilian authorities and results from interviews with such planners at five selected sites. Together, these form the basis for a planning support tool, for which the framework is described in this report.
Changing emergency planning rules to make nongovernmental organizations a key component of recovery efforts could get them involved earlier and speed the full recovery of communities after disaster strikes.
Experiences from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita showed that current emergency preparedness plans are inadequate to address the unique issues of special needs populations. This toolkit distills the most relevant emergency preparedness strategies, practices, and resources for these populations. It includes a Web-based Geographic Information Systems tool to identify and enumerate those with special needs in communities across the United States.
Presents tools for assessing state/local health departments' capability to rapidly deliver medical countermeasures in response to a public health emergency; provides a framework for determining which elements of the capability to assess; describes procedures for the five assessments developed; summarizes methods and findings from field tests; and identifies next steps and policy implications.
Improving public health emergency preparedness tops the national agenda but has been hindered by the lack of real-world situations to learn from. The Federal Government, therefore, asked RAND to facilitate the development of a research agenda that would expand the evidence base upon which preparedness policies are based.
One under-examined area of public health emergency preparedness concerns incidents involving the release of chemical or radiological substances, which can have serious public health consequences. This report focuses on the roles of the public health service in emergency preparedness and its response to such incidents.
The Mumbai terrorist attacks in India suggest the possibility of an escalating terrorist campaign in South Asia and the rise of a strategic terrorist culture. This report identifies the operational and tactical features of the attack, evaluates the response of Indian security forces, and analyzes the implications for the region and the U.S.
Mounting an effective emergency response to a public health threat, such as a pandemic influenza, is a common challenge of state and local public health agencies across the country. The PREPARE toolkit provides a brief tutorial on using quality improvement methods to build agency capabilities and public health emergency preparedness.
While traditional terrorism-prevention measures seek to prevent all damage by stopping attacks completely, the author recommends also adopting measures that seek to prevent only some of the damage from attacks, but that do so predictably across the many different ways in which they might occur, drawing examples from aviation security policy.
Decisionmakers today largely assess emergency preparedness and homeland security "in the rear view mirror," looking at performance in actual events and responding to perceived failures. While real-world experience is important, better ways to assess preparedness prospectively will lead to better choices as to how and where to strengthen it.
In order to ensure that the U.S. government is able to dispense antibiotics and other life-saving medical countermeasures to large populations under short timelines in the case of a large-scale public health emergency, this report recommends standards for points of dispensing that are designed to apply to widely divergent jurisdictions.
New training manuals provide a curricula that can be used to train hospital and clinic staff as well as department of mental health staff on how to prepare for and respond to the psychological consequences of large-scale disasters.
Testimony presented before the House Education and Labor Committee on September 12, 2007.
In response to the 9/11 attacks, state and local response organizations took a number of steps to increase preparedness. Areas that still need improvement include coordination with the private sector, coordination among nontraditional partners such as public health, and expectations of the role of the military.
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