Strengthening Public Health and Healthcare Preparedness through Innovation, Integration, and Implementation

Over the past decade, great strides have been made to advance public health preparedness. Yet, ongoing resource limitations highlight the need for those engaged in preparedness to re-energize and refocus their efforts, leverage partnerships, and integrate their activities across programs and systems. The 2013 Public Health Preparedness Summit will provide a national forum for public health and healthcare professionals, emergency managers, and other leaders to collaborate, learn, and share best practices. As this difficult budgetary climate persists, the challenge has become not only doing more with less, but implementing innovative strategies and integrated systems to protect our nation’s public health.

The 2013 Summit will offer a strategic overview on the current state of public health preparedness and highlight research, technical, and practice-based perspectives on strengthening community preparedness while also building and sustaining healthcare coalitions. In-depth discussions will encourage collaboration among all levels of government, along with the private and non-profit sectors, to develop cross-cutting solutions to some of the most difficult public health preparedness challenges. Conferences sessions will explore areas including mass prophylaxis and catastrophic preparedness, community resilience, biosurveillance, volunteer management, administrative preparedness, public health law, and crisis standards of care. The 2013 Summit will be a starting point—attendees will leave the conference with tools, resources, and networks to assist in their actionable implementation of innovative and integrated solutions within their communities.