Thursday, September 19, 2024
9/19/2024
For more than 20 years, North Carolina has maintained a public health and healthcare preparedness program that invests in sustainable planning, infrastructure building, and response and recovery components. Progress in workforce development, infrastructure capacity, building partnerships and coalitions has been achieved at the state, local and healthcare entity level statewide. This has been evidenced by the system’s ability to respond to and recover from many small and large-scale incidents and events of every hazard. Utilizing the HPP and PHEP capabilities and domains, honest post-incident evaluation and continuous self-evaluation has led to system-wide improvements, enhancements and steady progress and growth. Leveraging the talent and research opportunities of our strong academic partners has also allowed North Carolina’s public health response system to be local, state and national leaders. This funding opportunity will be used to address the public health preparedness and response capabilities required to respond to a scenario involving an emerging infectious disease outbreak and other public health crises or emergencies. The work plan addresses initial incident command capability for early crisis response and recovery activities (“Component A”), including emergency operations center (EOC) activation, staffing contracts, needs assessment, accelerated planning, and call center activation; and, crisis-specific response activities (“Component B”), including biosurveillance, information management, countermeasures and mitigation and surge management. The ultimate goal is to enhance the State’s and nation’s ability to rapidly mobilize, surge, and respond to public health emergencies identified by CDC. Strategies to address an uncharacterized public health emergency include: command, control, communications, and coordination with local health departments; enhanced surveillance (reportable disease and syndromic); surge staffing such as deploying staff to healthcare providers or local health departments to conduct active surveillance; production and distribution of material and online risk communication with adaptation for plain language, low-literacy and translations (including the community, the local health department and healthcare providers); public information campaigns (joint information center and local health department materials); transport and distribution of surge personnel, materials and support for coordination, vector and disease surveillance, control, and eradication; locations for isolation and quarantine; healthcare provider collaboration for surge capacity; medical countermeasures reception, distribution, and administration; laboratory surge capacity, personnel, and equipment; provision for isolation and quarantine of potentially exposed and contacts for long durations; cleanup, decontamination, transportation, and handling of infectious or contaminated materiel.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).
