Public Health Emergency Preparedness (PHEP) Cooperative Agreement - Project Abstract Summary Oregon PHEP Cooperative Agreement, April 2024 The Oregon Health Authority’s Public Health Division will continue the implementation of the Public Health Emergency Preparedness cooperative agreement through the Health Security, Preparedness and Response program. The majority of financial resources are distributed to local and tribal public health agencies, the Portland HSPR program, the HPP and PHEP liaisons who coordinate local and regional activities, the Acute and Communicable Disease Program based in Portland, and the Oregon State Public Health Laboratory in Hillsboro. The HSPR program builds on a substantial infrastructure, workforce, and history over 20 years. Purpose: HSPR will continue to maintain and grow the strong state‐local‐tribal public health partnerships and programs that it has established in each of the 36 counties, and all nine tribes. HSPR will continue to leverage the PHEP and HPP cooperative agreements in tandem. Oregon has seen how an effective response can prevent or reduce morbidity and mortality from threats and emergencies whose scale, rapid onset, or unpredictability stresses the public health and health care system. Outcomes: The HSPR program will direct, collaborate, fund, monitor and evaluate across all capabilities, and demonstrate increased emergency preparedness capability through real incident response, recovery and exercises. In partnership with the regional HCCs, HSPR will assess, improve and continue to evaluate the capacity to ensure the rapid assessment and earliest possible information sharing and investigation of evolving incidents, implement interventions and control measures as soon as possible, communicate situational awareness and risk information to partners and the community, manage surge of both patients and affected and response resources, support incident management, and ongoing learning and improvements for individual responders, teams, organizations and systems. Strategies for 2024‐29 Oregon’s implementation of the national PHEP program will support the three priority strategies: 1. Prioritize a risk‐based approach to all‐hazards planning and improve readiness, response, and recovery capacity for existing and emerging public health threats and modernized laboratory and electronic data systems. 2. Improve whole community readiness, response, and recovery through enhanced partnerships and improved communication systems for timely situational awareness and risk communication. 3. Improve capacity to meet jurisdictional administrative, budget, and public health surge management needs and to improve public health response workforce recruitment, retention, resilience, and mental health.
