Missouri Hospital Preparedness Program Cooperative Agreement - HPP Project Abstract: Missouri Missouri’s public health and healthcare partners – governmental, public and private entities – recognize the necessity of integrated and collaborative planning for preparedness, response and recovery in order to assure an expedited, coordinated response to an emergency incident. Missouri has ongoing small to medium-sized emergency incidents, whether declared or non-declared; examples include floods, ice/snow and other adverse weather events, influenza, civil unrest, and chemical spills. As well, our state’s vulnerabilities to larger scale incidents, such as tornados as experienced in the 2011 Joplin tornado and the 2019 Jefferson City tornado or the potential earthquake associated with a New Madrid Seismic Zone fault disruption, are well recognized threats to our healthcare system, our ability to adequately respond to, protect and care for our citizens, as well as the profound healthcare and economic recovery that would ensue following such a large-scale incident. Missouri takes these vulnerabilities and our collective responsibility to prepare, plan, train, exercise, respond and plan for recovery very seriously and actively uses all available resources to continually enhance our ESF-8 system and the integration with other response partners. Missouri’s HPP application details how Missouri’s healthcare system partners will organize to develop, implement and sustain three regional healthcare coalitions to operationalize jurisdictional preparedness, response and recovery plans and the integration of those jurisdictional plans with local public health plans, as well as state-level plans. Missouri HPP, specifically, contracts with three healthcare coalition fiscal intermediaries to provide technical support and assistance to the state’s three healthcare coalitions, as well as sub-recipient contracts with the state’s mental health authority and the state’s emergency management agency. Missouri HPP works closely with Missouri PHEP to align projects, assure integration of local public health into the respective healthcare coalitions, and generally support the overall Emergency Support Function-8 (ESF-8) planning and response capability. Missouri recognizes that this collaboration across all levels will ensure effective responses which will prevent or reduce morbidity and mortality from incidents with public health or medical impacts whose scale, rapid onset, or unpredictability stresses the public health and healthcare systems and to ensure the earliest possible recovery and return of public health and health care systems to the pre-incident levels or to levels of improved functioning.
