Public health emergency preparedness exercises: lessons learned.

The Harvard School of Public Health Center for Public Health Preparedness exercise program has two aims: (1) educating the public health workforce on key public health system emergency preparedness issues, and (2) identifying specific systems-level challenges in the public health response to large-scale events. Rigorous evaluation of 38 public health emergency preparedness (PHEP) exercises employing realistic scenarios and reliable and accurate outcome measures has demonstrated the usefulness of PHEP exercises in clarifying public health workers' roles and responsibilities, facilitating knowledge transfer among these individuals and organizations, and identifying specific public health systems-level challenges.

Translating research evidence into practice to reduce health disparities: a social determinants approach.

Translating research evidence to reduce health disparities has emerged as a global priority. The 2008 World Health Organization Commission on Social Determinants of Health recently urged that gaps in health attributable to political, social, and economic factors should be closed in a generation. Achieving this goal requires a social determinants approach to create public health systems that translate efficacy documented by research into effectiveness in the community. We review the scope, definitions, and framing of health disparities and explore local, national, and global programs that address specific health disparities. Such efforts translate research evidence into real-world settings and harness collaborative social action for broad-scale, sustainable change.

Public health systems research in emergency preparedness: a review of the literature.

BACKGROUND: Despite the acknowledged promise of developing a public health systems research (PHSR) agenda for emergency preparedness, there has been no systematic review of the literature in this area. The purpose of this study was to conduct a systematic literature review in order to identify and characterize the PHSR literature produced in the U.S. in the past 11 years in the field of public health emergency preparedness. EVIDENCE ACQUISITION: Articles were searched in MEDLINE and EMBASE, as well as in the gray literature. Two independent reviewers classified the articles according to study design and IOM public health emergency preparedness (PHEP) research goal areas. EVIDENCE SYNTHESIS: From January 1, 1997, through December 31, 2008, there were 547 articles that met the inclusion criteria that were published. It was possible to classify 314 (57%) articles into at least one of the four IOM PHEP research goal areas. Of these, 61 (11%) addressed Research Area 1 (usefulness of training); 39 (7%) addressed Research Area 2 (communications in preparedness and response); 193 (35%) addressed Research Area 3 (sustainable preparedness and response systems); and 39 (7%) addressed Research Area 4 (criteria and metrics to measure effectiveness and efficiency). Twenty-one studies (4%) could be classified into more than one category. The majority of the articles (81%), including commentaries/reviews and case studies, were based on qualitative analysis. Commentaries/review articles were the most common study types (62%). CONCLUSIONS: Since 2001, the PHSR literature on PHEP issues has grown at about 33% per year. However, most studies lack a rigorous design, raising questions about the validity of the results.