Every response starts and ends at the local level. The Mecklenburg County Public Health (MCPH) Preparedness Team works hard to ensure our department is prepared to respond to all public health emergencies including infectious, occupational or environmental hazards. To date, our program has responded to a host of emergencies to include Hepatitis A, Zika, COVID-19, hurricanes, and severe weather as well as nuclear events.
During each event, we serve as the department’s coordinators to 1) monitor and respond to the event 2) provide assistance and support to all partners and 3) provide guidance and recommendation for key decisions makers.
Before and after events, we develop strategic plans to outline how our department will respond to each event. At the conclusion of developing a plan, we train and exercise to test our overall readiness. Exercising our plans allows our team the opportunity to evaluate the department on overall readiness to ensure we can respond to any event.
Six Domains of Preparedness
The Mecklenburg County Public Health Preparedness Program works diligently to advance the six areas of preparedness to ensure readiness for all emergencies that may impact the public’s health. Check out each of the domain’s below to learn how we prepare for all potential threats. Each domain listed below provides our team with a standard framework as we plan, exercise, and evaluate our ability to respond and recover from all public health emergencies.
Community Resilience - Preparing for and recovering from emergencies
Community resilience focuses on enhancing the overall health and well-being of communities to reduce harm from disasters. Addressing these emergencies is done by incorporating what we already know about preparing for disasters and partnering with key community leaders to build relationships to account for specific challenges that may impact YOUR community.
Incident Management - Coordinating an effective response
Incident management involves strengthening and coordinating preparedness efforts to prevent, mitigate, prepare, respond and recover from man-made (terrorist attacks), natural disasters (hurricanes) and other emergencies. As the Preparedness Team, we represent the health department during local emergencies and ensure request for health and medical assistance is responded to quickly.
Information Management - Making sure people have information to take action
The Preparedness Team works to ensure out information systems support the health department’s ability to prepare and respond to disasters. Information management ensures all partners are able to communicate and that we have a clear understanding of what’s happening during the response.
Countermeasures and Mitigation - Getting medicines and supplies where they are needed
MCPH is a part of the Cities Readiness Initiative (CRI) Region that receives additional federal support to develop county-wide guidance and plans related to mass distribution of medications and supplies in a large event. This may include vaccine, medication, personal protective equipment and more.
Surge Management - Expanding medical services to handle large events
Surge management involves the coordination of emergency preparedness, response and recovery standards within our local healthcare systems. To do so, the Preparedness Team coordinates with key partners such as our local and regional healthcare coalitions, emergency medical services and emergency management.
Biosurveillance - Investigation and identify health threats
Biosurveillance is the identification and investigation of threats to health. To properly identify such threats, the Preparedness Team works closely with local healthcare epidemiologists and our departments epidemiology and communicable disease
program to analyze and make evidence-based decisions. Such information can help identify outbreaks. Specifically, the Preparedness Team works to develop processes and systems for new and emerging threats like Zika or COVID-19 or conditions that we don’t see often but require a robust public health response such as measles.
For more general information about Public Health Emergency Preparedness, check out the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s
website.