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Influenza Plan Needs More White House Monitoring |
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by Mickey McCarter
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Monday, 14 December 2009 |
GAO calls oversight of flu preparedness incomplete
The White House must take extra steps to ensure that all of the action items identified in the Implementation Plan for the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza actually are carried out, congressional investigators warned Friday, calling for confirmation of non-federal activities and more information on all activities.
The Homeland Security Council (HSC) meets with federal agencies responsible for carrying out 324 action items under the Implementation Plan, but none of them monitor 17 action items intended for state, local, and tribal governments--including ensuring that preparedness plans address mass immunization and other items, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in its report Influenza Pandemic: Monitoring and Assessing the Status of the National Pandemic Implementation Plan Needs Improvement.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) could solve that problem by providing more information from a review it leads of state pandemic plans, GAO suggested.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, expressed concern about potential lapses in pandemic preparedness identified in the GAO report.
"When the H1N1 outbreaks started occurring this spring, we knew that our nation was still in the midst of getting ready for a pandemic. This report provides us a partial explanation as to why this was the case--having not measured preparedness properly we could not know how much further we needed to go to become fully ready," Thompson said in a Dec. 11 statement.
"Although we are still in the midst of responding to the H1N1 pandemic, it is imperative that all federal, state, and private sector stakeholders identify the weaknesses and strengths of the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza and its Implementation Plan," he added. "GAO determined that monitoring and assessment were weaknesses for the Implementation Plan. I hope the White House National Security staff uses this and other information to update the Strategy and its Implementation Plan shortly after the end of the pandemic."
The GAO report also noted that the Implementation Plan does not describe what sort of information agencies must collect to ensure action items related to response have been completed.
The HSC previously reported that most of the 324 action items were complete as of October 2008--six months before the H1N1 flu outbreak spread to the United States. But GAO reviewed 60 action items and concluded it was difficult to assess whether 49 of them labeled as complete actually were.
"All of the action items reviewed have both a description of activities to be carried out and a measure of performance, which the HSC stated that it used to assess completion. However, for more than half of the action items considered complete, the measures of performance do not fully address all of the activities contained in their descriptions," the report stated.
Future progress reports on the Implementation Plan for the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza should use measures of performance outlined in the description of the Implementation Plan's action items in order to make reporting consistent, the report said.
The HSC produced the Implementation Plan in May 2006 to organize US preparedness activities for a flu pandemic. Originally drawn up following concerns about avian flu, the Implementation Plan bases some of its assumptions on different pandemic characteristics than those witnessed in the H1N1 swine flu outbreak, the report observed. Although the Implementation Plan is augmented by an additional plan that addresses the specific characteristics of the H1N1 virus, the White House would benefit from updating the plan to account for some missing elements and incorporating lessons learned from the H1N1 pandemic.
GAO also recommended that updates to the Implementation Plan include monitoring and assessment improvements identified in its report. The principal deputy counsel to the President responded that the White House would consider the GAO recommendations.
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Mickey McCarter |
| About the author: |
| eNewsletter Editor/Senior Washington Correspondent,
is a journalist with more than a decade of experience in reporting
on
military affairs and information technology.
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