Public health practice and public health research during emergency response

Prior to and during emergency events, public health agencies routinely collect and analyze identifiable health information to perform a number of public health activities including public health surveillance, outbreak investigations, program evaluations, community health assessments, and population-based clinical care.  Emergency response activities tend to be characterized as public health practice, or non-research, because these projects are undertaken to identify, characterize, and solve an immediate health problem and the knowledge gained will directly benefit those participants involved in the investigation or their communities. Actionable information collected by public health agencies to guide response, while essential, has been insufficient to answer a broad range of research questions during past emergency events.  When the benefits from data collection activity accrue to persons affected by future incidents (e.g., assessing the effectiveness of types of evacuation recommendations in influencing decision-making), the public health activity might have a research component.  To ensure research activities that yield information not immediately pertinent to the event response are a prudent public health investment, public health research should address clearly articulated, important questions or hypotheses and be appropriately designed to maximize the likelihood of producing meaningful results.  This presentation will discuss the essential characteristics of public health practice and public health research and the factors and decision-making processes relevant to determining whether to conduct public health research during a response and, if so, how CDC response activities can provide a platform for subsequent research efforts.