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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Recorded presentation

John B. Wayne, PhD¹, JoAnn Bolick, MA², Cammie Marti, BSN, MPH¹, and Lewis Leslie, BS². (1) College of Public Health, Univ of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, 4301 West Markham Street, Slot #820, Little Rock, AR 72205-7199, (501)526-6604, jwayne@uams.edu, (2) Division of Health, Arkansas Department of Health and Human Services, 4815 West Markham, Little Rock, AR 72205

Like many States, Arkansas is preparing its public health (PH) workforce for any natural or manmade disaster necessitating a PH response. Part of this effort involved preparing “Training Teams” who would then provide the content to all governmental public health workers and to their community partners. The goal is that every PH employee would be able to: 1) Explain the State Emergency Management Plan (MDIRP) and how it fits into the National Emergency Response Plan (NRP); 2) Understand their organization unit's role in the MDIRP; 3) Articulate their individual role in the MDIRP and how their role fits into the successful accomplishment of the Agency's role in Emergency Management (EM). In addition, trainees should be able to: 4) Explain the inter-relationship between the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management and other external partners and 5) Understand how state health office and local resources can be utilized in an event.

This study reports the results of training team preparation and the differences in application by the training teams in “rural” regions (n=30) versus the training teams based in Little Rock (n=22). Both urban and rural training teams had similar levels of EM knowledge at baseline and both had significant increases in knowledge after training (paired t-test, p<0.05).

During the study period, each Training Team conducted another training of employees within their urban/rural organizational units. Each Training Team presented similar content and all trainings were judged to be effective. However, Rural Training Teams were more likely to add to, subtract from, and reorder the training content.

The results include: 1) At pre-test, rural (n=97) trainees had greater confidence in their ability to perform emergency preparedness (EP) activities than their urban (n=54) counterparts (p<0.05); 2) At post-test, rural and urban trainees had the same confidence in their ability to perform (EM) activities; 2) Rural trainees were more familiar with potential threats and targets of mass destruction in their locality than urban trainees. 3) Based on pre-test/post-test knowledge comparisons rural trainees had a slightly greater knowledge at baseline and a significant knowledge increase (p<0.05). Urban trainees had a slight, statistically insignificant knowledge increase.

Because of incidents like the World trade center, our national emergency preparedness response has been focused on high-priority urban targets. However, all disasters are local and this study reports on an effective methodology for developing the PH infrastructure rural areas. Further, rural PH employees had a significant knowledge increase.

Learning Objectives: Learning Objectives At the conclusion of the session, participants will be able to

• Describe the rural/urban differences in emergency preparedness training of a governmental public health workforce;
• Describe a methodology utilized to enhance the public health infrastructure through disaster preparedness training;
• Apply an evaluation methodology to assess training effectiveness.

Keywords: Bioterrorism, Public Health Infrastructure

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No

Recorded presentation