A new toolkit “meant to assist state and local public health agencies improve their emergency preparedness activities” for special needs populations has been released under a project funded by the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (HHSASPR).

Executed by the Center for Public Health Preparedness within RAND Health, the toolkit “distills the most relevant strategies, practices, and resources from a variety of sources.”

The report of the program that developed the toolkit, Enhancing Public Health Emergency Preparedness for Special Needs Populations: A Toolkit for State and Local Planning and Response, stated that “experiences from recent emergencies, such as Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, have shown that current emergency preparedness plans are inadequate to address the unique issues of special needs populations.”

“Public health emergency preparedness planning for special needs populations (e.g., individuals with disabilities, children) is critical for public health departments because individuals who might need special attention are often the most difficult to reach before, during, and after an event,” the report stated, noting that “as we have learned from emergencies over the past few years, our current plans are inadequate to meet the needs of these populations, and often these populations are the most negatively affected.”

A hearing last week on the issue of addressing special needs populations during disasters held by the House Committee on Homeland Security Subcommittee on Emergency Communications, Preparedness and Response focused in on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) ability to meet the needs of these populations during emergencies.

Subcommittee Chairwoman Laura Richardson, D-Calif., said “when it comes to disaster planning, the needs for all are great; therefore, those with greater accessibility issues should not be left as a second or separate thought for window dressing. The Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 included many reforms to provide FEMA with the necessary tools and leadership to integrate “need” related issues into the overall emergency preparedness plan.”

Richardson questioned, for example, what would happen “if a disaster strikes” when children are in school. “It would leave the students, school administrators and staff and parents in a situation where more than safety drills are needed. In the 37th Congressional District, there are hundreds of schools ranging from preschool through college located within 20 miles of the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, major transportation corridors and other possible targets of large-scale hostile attacks, not to mention the real possibility of earthquakes or other natural disasters and public health emergencies. With these circumstances, it is vital that the schools in high risk or rural communities across the nation be involved with the planning and are ready to act quickly and effectively if a disaster happens.”

The HHSASPR backed “toolkit is meant to assist state and local public health agencies improve their emergency preparedness activities. It distills the most relevant strategies, practices, and resources from a variety of sources, including peer-reviewed research, government reports, the trade literature, and public health leaders, to identify priority populations and critical strategies.”

The contents include “potential strategies for addressing special needs, summaries of promising practices implemented in communities across the country, information on how to select one or more practices that will work in a specific community, information on how to determine whether a practice is working, and a Web-based Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tool to identify and enumerate those with special needs in communities across the United States. Used together, this toolkit and the GIS tool are intended to provide a comprehensive resource to enable public health planners to account for special needs populations in their emergency preparedness efforts.”

Continuing, the HHSASPR toolkit report explained that “the toolkit … highlights several practices that local public health agencies have found to be effective for enhancing preparedness planning and response for special needs populations, the challenges they have faced in implementing those practices, and the strategies they have employed to overcome those challenges. Many of the strategies, practices, and resources provided here could be useful to other emergency response agencies and applicable to any emergency response.”