The 131st Annual Meeting (November 15-19, 2003) of APHA

Abstract #61865

Betty Bekemeier, MSN, MPH, RN, Turning Point National Program Office, University of Washington-School of Public Health, 6 Nickerson St., Suite 300, Seattle, WA 98109, 206-616-8410, bettybek@u.washington.edu and Janis L. Dahl, MA, RN, Senior Consultant, Turning Point National Program Office, University of Washington, School of Public Health, 6 Nickerson Street, Suite 300, Seattle, WA 98109.

Nearly a billion dollars were made available to State Health Departments through federal grants in the spring of 2002, requiring comprehensive plans for public health emergency preparedness. Twenty one of these states had already been participating for some years in The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Turning Point Initiative. Through this project, states have developed multi-sector public-private partnerships to produce public health improvements plans; from these, they have chosen one or more priorities for implementation.

Turning Point state coordinators were interviewed about their perspectives on the links between their work with Turning Point and the challenges of planning for bioterrorism preparedness. Key themes included (a) how the work of Turning Point in their state had "set the stage" for emergency preparedness planning and enabled their state to develop a more effective and responsive proposal for their application, (b) the integration of emergency preparedness into a broader framework of public health infrastructure during the grant application process, and (c) the challenges to public health infrastructure development that were apparent through the process of preparing these plans.

This paper illustrates how prior practice and experience in developing collaborations and institutionalizing a model of broad based partnerships for public health decision-making can increase effectiveness and efficiency in responding to a call for action around an emergency.

Learning Objectives:

At the conclusion of the session, the participant will be able to:
• Identify several areas of overlap between bioterrorism planning and building multi-sector collaborative partnerships.
• Describe three strategies used by Turning Point states for planning and implementing bioterrorism preparedness.
• Discuss the challenges to public health infrastructure development that are made apparent in bioterrorism preparedness planning

Keywords: System Involvement, Collaboration

Related Web page: www.turningpointprogram.org/

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.