摘要：Currently, public health emergency preparedness (PHEP) is not well defined. Discussions about public health preparedness often make little progress, for lack of a shared understanding of the topic. We present a concise yet comprehensive framework describing PHEP activities. The framework, which was refined for 3 years by state and local health departments, uses terms easily recognized by the public health workforce within an information flow consistent with the National Incident Management System. To assess the framework's completeness, strengths, and weaknesses, we compare it to 4 other frameworks: the RAND Corporation's PREPARE Pandemic Influenza Quality Improvement Toolkit, the National Response Framework's Public Health and Medical Services Functional Areas, the National Health Security Strategy Capabilities List, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's PHEP Capabilities. “All models are wrong, some models are useful.” —George Box 1 Public health emergency preparedness (PHEP) has been defined as “the capability of the public health and health care systems, communities, and individuals, to prevent, protect against, quickly respond to, and recover from health emergencies, particularly those whose scale, timing, or unpredictability threatens to overwhelm routine capabilities.” 2 (p24) However, compared with more traditional public health activities such as food safety inspections, outbreak investigations, community health assessments, immunization clinics, and environmental monitoring, PHEP activities are not clearly defined. 2–4 We present a framework describing what public health agencies do to prepare for, respond to, and recover from public health emergencies. The framework was developed through a collaboration of state and local health departments, brought together by the Public Health Informatics Institute with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to define business processes related to PHEP. The Common Ground Preparedness Framework (CGPF) adds to other PHEP frameworks by more explicitly capturing how public health agencies prepare for and respond to public health emergencies. Combining comprehensiveness with specificity, it is especially useful in describing PHEP to both public health agencies and their partners in emergency response. It also provides a framework for incident action plans and after-action assessments, resource distribution, information systems, and training.
