Wisconsin Project Abstract Summary - CDC-RFA-TP22-2201
Public health preparedness plays a vital role in accomplishing the mission of the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) Division of Public Health (DPH) mission to “protect and promote the health and safety of the people of Wisconsin.” The state has created a robust response capability to deal with health emergencies, including rapid activation of incident management, pre-identified surge resources, pre-existing contracts and expedited administrative processes to ensure money and resources can be quickly acquired and distributed during response. This application describes actions that DHS would take during a large scale emerging disease outbreak, most of which are easily generalizable to health emergencies originating from any hazard and would achieve the following outcomes:
• Earliest possible activation and management of emergency operations
• Earliest possible identification and investigation of an incident/index case
• Timely implementation of intervention and control measures
• Timely communication of risk and essential elements of information by partners
• Timely coordination and support of response activities with healthcare and other partners
The gaps Wisconsin would see in a large-scale response, identified across all six federally defined domains ((1) incident management; 2) jurisdictional recovery; 3) biosurveillance; 4) information management; 5) countermeasures and mitigation; and, 6) surge management), and that could be supported through supplemental federal funding, are:
• staff: costs associated with surge personnel needs for DHS, including travel and related administrative costs
• partner support: costs associated with services and activities critical to responses that are handled by partners such as Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene, the Milwaukee Public Health Laboratory, 211, and a range of professional associations
• supplies: costs associated with general office supplies, Information technology equipment, coolers, etc.
• contracts: costs associated with established contracts for materials (PPE. pharmaceutical purchases) and services (foreign language translation, point of dispensing security)
• Local & Tribal Health Agencies: costs associated with awards to local agencies that support the activities required by the response including staff, training, supplies, information technology, etc.
• other costs: costs associated with miscellaneous items such as conference call lines, venue costs for tabletop exercises, costs for background checks performed by the Department of Justice, etc.
This cooperative agreement to support public health crisis response will allow DHS to more quickly activate these resources and processes in an event wherein additional federal support was released to augment overwhelmed state and local resources.
