Massachusetts Public Health Emergency Preparedness Program - With funding from CDC’s Public Health Emergency Preparedness (PHEP) Cooperative Agreement, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (MDPH) will strengthen public health preparedness, response, and recovery capacity and capability through a continuous cycle of planning, organizing, training, equipping, exercising, evaluating, and implementing corrective actions. Under the new cooperative agreement, MDPH will shift its focus from preparedness to response readiness. MDPH has used its statewide Hazard Vulnerability Assessment (HVA), developed with input from public health and healthcare stakeholders, to identify risks and utilize resources, partners, and procedures to stand up and staff a structure to respond and mitigate impacts, particularly to those more disproportionately impacted. Planning Year: The Office of Preparedness and Emergency Management (OPEM) will initiate, conduct and implement a one-year planning process during the first year of the new cooperative agreement. OPEM leadership will involve internal partners across the Department of Public Health to align MDPH’s Emergency Preparedness work with CDC’s Response Readiness Framework. This planning process entails a reallocation of resources from internal partners, the bureaus, services and offices within MDPH to align with new PHEP priorities for emergency response. Accordingly, OPEM leadership will meet and strategize with: • Office of Local and Regional Health • Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences (BIDLS) • Bureau of Climate and Environmental Health (BCEH) • Office of Health Equity (OHE) • DPH IT services and Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS) • DPH HR liaison with EOHHS The overall long term goals of the program with the support of CDC PHEP funding is to A) Achieve the earliest possible recovery and return of the public health system to pre-incident levels or improved functioning, and B) Prevent or reduce morbidity and mortality for all impacted populations from incidents with public health consequences whose scale, rapid onset, or unpredictability stresses the public health system.
