Wednesday, April 2, 2025
4/2/2025
Public Health Emergency Preparedness (PHEP) Cooperative Agreement - The mission of the Mississippi State Department of Health (MSDH) is to protect and advance the health, well-being, and safety of everyone in Mississippi. The MSDH is the lead response agency in Mississippi for emergencies impacting public health and medical services. The MSDH Division of Strategic Planning and Response (SPR) supports the emergency response efforts of the MSDH by taking an all-hazards approach to ensure we adequately support communities in need and prioritize recovery efforts for all Mississippians. The MSDH SPR will continue to bolster, expand, and enhance response readiness during the 5-year period of performance. The MSDH Division of Strategic Planning and Response (SPR) plans to establish new relationships and expand local partnerships to support our regional team approach to support the northern, delta, central, and southern public health regions. The focus to build our response capacity at the regional level, and ultimately the local level, will allow for a faster response time when a Mississippi community is in need and give the MSDH the ability to have a larger response workforce. We will continue to improve our plans with lessons learned from training and exercises. We plan to spend more time training our response workforce to equip them with what they need to ensure when disaster strikes, we can sustain and expand our response capabilities depending on the situation. The MSDH SPR will continue to sustain and expand our medical countermeasure capabilities by maintaining memoranda of understandings to support points of dispensing (PODs) processes and other Strategic National Stockpile activities. The MSDH SPR plans to expand our coordination with our Memphis and Jackson City Readiness Initiative (CRI) groups to ensure we can manage all hazards impacting some of our most populated areas. The MSDH SPR will also improve budgetary and administrative systems to ensure we are meeting all grant deliverables, building systems to support response documentation, and remaining audit ready at all times. The MSDH Division of SPR will collaborate, coordinate, and work with several different departments within our agency to ensure we have a flexible, scalable, and sustainable MSDH response workforce. We will work with the Office of Health Equity to expand partnerships to grow the at-risk coalition to ensure all Mississippians with access, functional needs, and/or at-risk groups are addressed in our plans and cared for appropriately during a disaster. The MSDH Office of Communications will continue to expand our communication platforms to ensure that all Mississippians receive accurate, timely, and effective information during day-to-day operations as well as during a disaster. The Mississippi Public Health Laboratory (MPHL) will continue to provide educational material for MPHL services and specimen referral to sentinel labs, conduct an annual review of the Laboratory Services Guide that lists tests performed, collection requirements, test methodology, reporting timeframes and facilitate certification of laboratorians in shipping and packaging infectious substances. The MPHL will also continue to build real time electronic lab reporting capabilities to ensure that they are sharing findings from lab samples in real time within our agency as well as to the CDC. The Office of Epidemiology will be enhancing the disease surveillance system to support data modernization in receiving information from local providers and well and sharing trends and potential public health threats in real time. The Division of Radiological Health supports and expands our response capabilities to radiological and nuclear events impacting our state.
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).