243528 Quantitative Analysis of Community Push Parnters to assist Emergency Planners

Tuesday, November 1, 2011: 3:10 PM

Sinan Khan, MPH, MA , Department of Public Health, Los Angeles County, Los Angeles, CA
Dee Ann Bagwell, MA, MPH , Department of Public Health, Los Angeles County, Los Angeles, CA
Anke Richter, PhD , Defense Resources Management Institute, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA
Alonzo L. Plough, PhD, MPH , Department of Public Health, Los Angeles County, Los Angeles, CA
     
Emergency planners at local health departments (LHDs) continue to develop mass prophylaxis plans in order to reduce mortality after a bioterrorist attack. Although, Points of Dispensing (PODs) serve as cornerstones for mass prophylaxis they may be insufficient due to resource constraints. Several LHDs are therefore beginning to explore the utilization of ‘Community Push Partners' to assist with mass prophylaxis.

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health (LACDPH) working with the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) and the CDC developed a multi-criteria decision support toolkit that assists LHDs analyze the effectiveness of various community push partners within their jurisdiction. The toolkit provides an objective hierarchy of the criteria that will be used to assess push partner effectiveness. The criteria are turned into measures by assigning values to their possible outcomes relative to the original POD capabilities and the jurisdiction's needs. Jurisdictions must also assess the relative importance of these criteria and determine and the trade-offs a decision-maker is willing to make between them. The toolkit requires basic input regarding maximum number of individuals reach, staffing requirements (clinical and non-clinical) and security rating (site and transportation) for each community push partner. Finally, the toolkit provides a simple graphical output detailing optimal community push partners for the jurisdiction as well as a one-way and two-way sensitivity analysis.

This toolkit was developed as a part of a SNS Webinar hosted by the CDC in February 2011 and was applied by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health to develop its alternate dispensing strategy.

Learning Areas:
Conduct evaluation related to programs, research, and other areas of practice
Program planning
Public health administration or related administration
Public health or related public policy
Systems thinking models (conceptual and theoretical models), applications related to public health

Learning Objectives:
1. Understand the methodology for defining effectiveness of Community Push Partners. 2. Evaluate the effectiveness of ‘Community Push Partners’ using such a Multi-Attribute Decision Analysis Toolkit.

Keywords: Emergency, Evaluation

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: Working as a planner for the Los Angeles County (LAC) Department of Public Health I have worked on refining alternate dispensing strategies in LAC for an extensive period of time. In LAC – we have used the model developed as a part of my thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School to analyze possible community partnerships.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.

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