The purpose and intent of the ADH utilization of the Public Health Crisis Response funds is to increase the public health ability to rapidly mobilize, surge, and respond. The award will also be used to mitigate the health risk of a novel respiratory disease to the people of Arkansas. ADH seeks to achieve this goal through the following activities:
• Enhance surveillance systems and or data management/informatics.
• Bolster efforts to augment the capacity of the state healthcare infrastructure.
• Strengthen multisectoral, One Health coordination activities for zoonotic disease threats.
• Ensure ADH can collaborate with partners at all jurisdictional levels to mitigate the health risks of a novel respiratory disease pandemic in the state of Arkansas.
• Increase the capacity to conduct public messaging and information sharing activities.
Outcomes:
Arkansas will focus on achieving multiple outcomes that are directly linked to activities specified by the CDC and identified in the paragraph above. Outcomes that will drive performance are linked to each of the six domains:
• ADH will prioritize public health services for sustainment.
• ADH will activate the EOC quickly after the need has been identified.
• ADH will strengthen incident management for crisis response by improving the ability to sustain long-term EOC operations, surveillance, and lab operations through emergency hiring and training of temporary personnel.
• ADH will enhance the ability to rapidly initiate a public health communications campaign, utilizing a Joint Information System (JIS), to allow for rapid unified information released to the public including identified at risk populations.
• Provide personnel, commodity, and safety recommendation support to the public health and medical community to enable a sustained response.
• Leverage the public health laboratory response networks and laboratory testing capability.
• Conduct laboratory surge operations to provide identification and notification of transmission rates to public health and medical officials.
• Strengthen Biosurveillance by operationalizing electronic disease surveillance systems.
• Enhance the sharing of Essential Elements of Information (EEI) amongst the public health and medical community for surge data capture.
• Provide commodity and countermeasure support to medical surge infrastructure to include Health Care Coalition (HCC) alternate care sites and EMS resources.
