National Bioterrorism Hospital Preparedness Program - To build and strengthen Wisconsin's ability to respond effectively to public health threats. - Wisconsin Department of Health Services (WI DHS) intends to use both the upcoming National Health Care Preparedness and Response Capabilities, and the former 2017-2022 capabilities documents to inform the workplan for budget periods 1-5 of this new grant cycle. WI DHS will build upon the existing capabilities of building a Foundation for Health Care and Medical Readiness, Health Care and Medical Response Coordination, Continuity of Health Care Service Delivery, and Medical Surge. Focusing on a whole community approach, WI DHS intends to take previous lessons learned from plans created, exercises conducted, and real-life scenarios in the past grant cycle and transition this existing structure to also fit new goals/objectives driven by the new capabilities, including Incident Management and Coordination, Information Management, Patient Movement and Distribution, Workforce, Resources, Operational Continuity, Specialty Care, and Community Integration. This will be a primary driver in WI DHS’s path to continued success towards increasing whole community health care readiness. There are four strategic groupings of activities; establish governance, assess readiness, plan & implement, and exercise & improve. Using different activity strategies will include using a variety of assessments, cybersecurity, workforce, extended downtime health care delivery impact, supply chain integrity, and others, to assist in this process. Conducting assessments of these areas will allow for plan implementation, exercise creation, increased preparedness for our health care community, and inform how to increase future readiness. A few plans that will rely on these assessments include the strategic, readiness, training and exercises, and patient movement plans. Creating priorities, identifying challenges and potential solutions to overcome them, and taking an objective approach to our strengths and weaknesses will all be critical in helping WI DHS succeed in this endeavor. A vital focus of this new grant cycle will be to engage with our partners. Partners in the health care community and from a variety of health care areas have and continue to be an integral part of the assessments, plans, and other activities conducted throughout the grant cycle. Using the evaluations and data collected during each budget period, WI DHS will be able to identify weaknesses and gaps that can attempt to be filled in the successive budget periods. Focusing on establishing & acting on multi-year priorities, enhancing & sustaining Healthcare Emergency Readiness Coalitions (HERCs), coordination, and continuity of health care service delivery will improve health care readiness across the entire state. Our focus will be to improve regional HERC coalition capabilities across the seven regions of Wisconsin. Using these regional coalitions as building blocks within our preparedness planning process; planning, training, exercising, improving, and beyond, will allow WI DHS to create whole community health care approaches to overall readiness, planning capabilities, and training capacities. This bottom-up approach not only allows regional HERCs more flexibility within our state, but it helps inform state planning and assessments with very concrete and reliable local data and necessary information. Working together with a large variety of health care partners, WI DHS is seeking to take the HPP Program to the next level of readiness for our entire health care community.
