Strategic Goal 1: Prepare for Future Public Health Emergencies and Disasters

To protect all members of our communities, equity must be a foremost consideration in ASPR’s preparedness activities, including identifying existing systems that may be contributing to continued inequality.

Objective 1.2 Key Milestones:

1. Build, support, and sustain a diverse, ready, and resilient public health emergency response workforce that can enhance the activities of the existing public health and healthcare workforce.
2. Identify the MCMs needed for each potential threat and make sure that use-case scenarios and implementation strategies will result in equality in accessibility, particularly for systemically underserved communities.
3. Ensure continuity of public health and medical services for all affected members of a community.
4. Establish and cultivate relationships with community partners who ensure community access during public health threats and disasters.
   

Establishing relationships and lines of communication with SLTT and private sector partners prior to an incident is an essential element of preparedness. During an emergency, the need to communicate is immediate and having existing relationships of trust with partners as well as agreed to communication protocols will expedite response efforts.

Objective 1.3 Key Milestones:

1. Share planning assumptions and capability constraints with SLTT partners well ahead of any emergency and increase coordination at earlier timepoints to ensure actions and MCMs have maximum positive impact to preparedness and response.
2. Provide timely, straightforward, coordinated, and actionable communications to SLTT and private sector partners both before and during an emergency.
3. Enable coordination and information sharing across the entire continuum of care to better respond during an emergency.
   

During and after a disaster response, there are opportunities to collect lessons-learned to inform planning and enhance future response operations.

Objective 1.4 Key Milestones:

1. Establish capabilities-based assessments and measurable criteria that routinely evaluate HHS’ readiness and provide a systematic approach to prioritizing resources and mitigating risk to enhance and sustain response-ready support services.
2. Develop and implement a comprehensive and integrated Mission Assurance Risk Management Framework.
3. Validate disaster response capabilities through a structured exercise program that cascades from the federal level to the SLTT jurisdictions, including a regional program to plan, develop, and execute Emergency Support Function #8 (ESF #8) exercises.
4. Conduct active improvement planning by routinely incorporating knowledge from lessons learned into plan revisions, trainings, and exercises.
5. Coordinate lessons-learned reviews to obtain and incorporate input from key external stakeholders, including public and private sector partners as well as other federal agencies.