Discussion: Public Health And Emergency Preparedness

Public Health and Emergency Preparedness

Name

Affiliation

Date

Public Health and Emergency Preparedness

Question: 1

Public health preparedness is one of the most important objectives of the health care system, in order to provide better facilities and healthcare to the general public. Monitoring the health status of the community, diagnosing and investigating the health concerns of the community, informing, educating and empowering the community, and linking the general population to the needed personal health care services are some of the essential services which any health care setting would ensure to provide to the general public or the community.

In the case of five hundred bed teaching hospital, informing, educating and empowering the community, and linking the general population to the needed personal health care services are two of the most important essential services, which can affect the working of the hospital. In any setting, it is the responsibility of the health care unit to make the general public aware of the health care needs, as well as about the expected epidemics, so that the public becomes careful and seek the treatment when they find anything unusual. Educating and empowering the general population would affect the teaching hospital in the way that the population would be aware of the emergency needs and it would help the healthcare unit to control the mortality rate (Gamboa-Maldonado, Marshak, Sinclair, Montgomery, & Dyjack, 2012).

Linking the general population to the needed personal health care services would affect the teaching hospital by providing it the opportunity of identifying the population which faces the barriers towards the care. The hospital would be able to play its role in entering the deprived population into a well-developed and coordinated system of clinical care, which would bring positive health care outcomes for the whole community. It would also enable the community to get the targeted information for the risk-prone populations. Moreover, it would impact the teaching hospital to improve its working by providing essential services to the general public.

Question: 2

Emergency preparedness is one of the most important objectives of the health care systems, after facing disastrous situations like 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, which resulted in a huge number of causalities. Floods, fires, and hurricanes have become very common in the United States of America during the rent times, due to the environmental changes. In the case of being the CEO of a community hospital, I would have a greater responsibility for handling a large mass casualty event in my community. I would take responsibility and try my best to perform in an effective manner in the mass casualty situation. The most important step which I would take in the epidemic is to increase the space for the emergency rooms and operation theaters. I would mobilize the health care providers and ensure the provision of medications and other equipment needed for the sake of saving the patients. No patients would be directed to other hospitals due to the reason of lack of availability of space or the health care provider (Khan, O’Sullivan, Brown, Tracey, Gibson, Généreux, & Schwartz, 2018).

On the other hand, I would also ensure that quality of care would be maintained for all patients in the hospital that are not connected to the mass casualty event. There is no doubt in the fact that saving the lives of the people which were targeted by the mass causality is the foremost objective of the health care systems. However, in order to achieve that objective, the lives and health of other patients in the hospital setting cannot be compromised. So in order to take care of them, the health care practitioners and the nursing care staff would be provided d with the training and workshop which would help them to learn the techniques of working in such scenario.

References

Gamboa-Maldonado, T., Marshak, H. H., Sinclair, R., Montgomery, S., & Dyjack, D. T. (2012). Building capacity for community disaster preparedness: a call for collaboration between public environmental health and emergency preparedness and response programs. Journal of environmental health, 75(2), 24.

Khan, Y., O’Sullivan, T., Brown, A., Tracey, S., Gibson, J., Généreux, M., ... & Schwartz, B. (2018). Public health emergency preparedness: a framework to promote resilience. BMC public health, 18(1), 1344.