Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Program - PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS (PHEP) Cooperative Agreement CDC-RFA-TU24-0137 HAWAII PROJECT ABSTRACT The Office of Public Health Preparedness (OPHP), Hawaii Department of Health, is grateful for the opportunity to apply for the CDC PHEP Cooperative Agreement grant award. This funding over the years has been critical to our jurisdiction’s ability to build and strengthen public health emergency preparedness, response, and recovery capabilities. We will use funding from the 2024-2028 Cooperative Agreement award to further grow, improve upon, and sustain those capacities. During recent years, much of our time and effort has necessarily focused on real world responses – COVID-19, wildfires, volcanic eruptions, and more. Recognizing the increased needs for public health emergency response, in the new performance period we will use the Readiness Response Framework priorities to inform our program activities. Using the strategies outlined in the PHEP logic model, we will continue to develop and implement plans and activities to improve our response readiness. At the same time, we are firmly committed to maintaining and strengthening essential preparedness plans and activities. Without strongly established preparedness capabilities, we would not be able to respond as rapidly and effectively with a trained, equipped workforce. Our Work Plan outlines key strategies and activities we will conduct to address the many challenges we face now and in the coming years. For example, an immediate challenge is filling vacancies and retaining qualified staff. We will be working with our workforce development partners and others to improve employee recruitment and retention. Improving administrative preparedness is another challenge. Some of our ability to fully achieve outcomes is not entirely within our program’s control, but our proposed activities include partnerships and collaboration to measurably move toward desired outcomes. In like fashion for other challenges and areas of improvement, we will follow the PHEP logic model to plan, develop, and implement the strategies and activities to advance our response readiness priorities. Hawaii DOH seeks to embrace health equity practices in all stages of all our efforts. Our plans and activities will engage individuals and communities disproportionately impacted by social determinants of health, populations in rural and hard-to-reach geographic areas, and other vulnerable communities. We have seen firsthand the negative impacts of health disparities during emergencies and disasters, and view health equity not only as a desired end state, but also as the undergirding values and principles by which we will make progress toward that end. We seek to live aloha. By achieving the expected outcomes throughout the performance period, we will also further the mission of the Department of Health to protect and improve the health and environment for all people in Hawaii. Mahalo.
