The Ebola epidemic is a stark reminder that the United States needs a multi-pronged strategy to ensure vigilance and capacity to respond to all health threats. A late-breaking session, “U.S. Health System Preparedness: Lessons from Ebola & Other Threats” has been added to the 2015 National Health Policy Conference agenda for February 9 at 11:00 a.m. ET. The session will be moderated by Dr. Nicole Lurie, Assistant Secretary of Preparedness and Response, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. On site registration is still available.
On November 3, 2014 the Institute of Medicine in partnership with the National Academy of Science convened experts and stakeholders for Research Priorities to Inform Public Health and Medical Practice for Domestic Ebola Virus Disease (EVD): A Workshop. AcademyHealth research assistant Danielle Robbio prepared the following reaction to the event.
The recent epidemic of Ebola has thrust public health preparedness back into the spotlight. The disease has spread rapidly and dangerously across West Africa (Guiena, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Senegal) and cases have been confirmed in the United States. As media attention and scrutiny dies down, the opportunity exists to examine the three core functions of public health (i.e., assessment, policy development, and assurance). The field of health services research, and its sub-discipline, public health services and systems research (PHSR), is positioned to address the systems-level challenges posed by this unique threat. PHSR investigates the public health system’s organizational structure, financing, and processes, and could point to strategies for addressing the spread and treatment of a transnational disease, as well as chronic threats to America’s health.
The 2014 IOM workshop convened experts from all arenas—virologists, wildlife specialists, public health officials and physicians—in order to identify research priorities to prevent further spread and future outbreaks. (Read the full brief here.) In kicking off the event, Dr. Lurie noted “We do believe that it's possible to help to foster research during a response to inform practice and also to ensure that guidance in the future is based on the most current and best available science and to make sure that data are gathered before they are lost.”
(For more on the importance of studying real-time events, and methodological considerations for researching public health emergency preparedness system capacities, see:Getting from What to Why: Using Qualitative Methods in Public Health Systems Research)
Ultimately, this outbreak has sparked a nationwide re-examination of the unique role of governmental public health. How will the public health system respond to a transnational disease outbreak? How should it respond? And, more broadly, how should the public health infrastructure adapt to meet new population health challenges?
Given this increased scrutiny, the field of PHSR has the opportunity to revisit the three core functions of public health and address the systems issues raised in the workshop i.e., impact of Ebola on healthcare settings and procedures, household and mass transit risks, and vulnerabilities in the health care safety net. PHSR provides evidence that practitioners need to answer these questions, evaluate successes, identify best practices, and most important, learn from failures.