Presenters:

Moderator - Jack Herrmann, MSEd, NCC, LMHC, Senior Advisor and Chief, Public Health Programs, National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO)

Jennifer Freeland, State Volunteer Coordinator, Virginia Department of Health

Lori Upton, RN, BSN, MS, CEM, Director of Preparedness, SouthEast Texas Regional Advisory Council

Phillip Coule, MD, MBA, FACEP, Chairman of the Board of the National Disaster Life Support Foundation, Professor and Vice-Chairman of Clinical and Business Operations, Department of Emergency Medicine and Hospitalist Services, Medical College of Georgia, Georgia Regents University

Tener Goodwin Veenema, PhD, MPH, MS, RN, FAAN, Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, Center for Refugee and Disaster Response, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, President & Chief Executive Officer, Tener Consulting Group, LLC.

Session summarized and reported by:

Kandra Strauss-Riggs, MPH, Operations Director, NCDMPH

Overall Key Session Points:

1. This session outlined the following key challenges faced in educating and training the health workforce on disaster issues: time, lack of integration into core health professions training, keeping curricula current, applying lessons learned.

2. The session proposed ways to overcome these challenges including the following: add disaster health information to professional certification boards, provide a variety of online platforms, and incentivize it.

Session Summary:

The How Are We Working Toward a Trained and Competent Disaster Health Workforce? session consisted of a moderated discussion where speakers outlined their approaches to disaster health education and training, followed by a question and answer session with the audience. The moderator framed the discussion by using his background in public health disaster response and posed key questions that he viewed as challenges for those preparing the workforce. How do you establish a response to get the right people, at the right time, with the proper skills and abilities for an effective response? Are we training people to be confident and competent? What are we training people to do, and is it really what is needed? How do we train for long-cycle disasters, such as infectious disease outbreaks? He noted that a wealth of material and information is available to everyone in our field but you can read it all and you still may not understand how the system works and how all the pieces fit together.

Speaker 1 emphasized the need to ensure that disaster education is embedded in health professions training curricula and that there are additional elective opportunities for students as they move through their pre-professional training. Once they are in the workforce, it is very difficult to engage health professionals in training on these issues.

Speaker 2 noted the extremely truncated amount of time for training nurses as accelerated programs are increasingly adopted. They need evidence-based, competency-driven, high-quality content that can be delivered in a variety of formats at different points in their training and career.

Speaker 3 discussed the standardization of training and monthly drills across a complex, large health care coalition with a leadership structure that prioritizes the coalition’s training needs.

Speaker 4 outlined the challenges faced in training the volunteer section of the workforce and the need to engage partners broadly, share strategies, and measure outcomes through drills and exercises.

An audience member suggested that the federal partners give the locals 1 to 5 training metrics to use as they prioritize training for their workforce.

In discussion among the speakers and moderator about “lessons learned,” it was clear that the translations of lessons from each disaster are not being well applied to the next event and we need to better leverage the lessons in each community.

Keeping curricula fresh and offering a spectrum of opportunities, particularly for newer professionals, are ongoing challenges. The moderator suggested that leveraging social media platforms and other technology could assist with both, but we need to remain mindful that a digital divide still exists. While our content is amenable to delivery in small pieces, we do not have a framework for doing that.

Audience members noted that getting disaster health knowledge on the professional certification boards and as continuing education units (CEUs) to maintain licensure are key drivers for education and training in this space and there are efforts underway to advocate for that. There was panel discussion about the need to incentivize the education, in addition to the “stick” efforts, such as requiring professionals to demonstrate knowledge of disaster health concepts in order to pass their board certification exams.

In discussion, it was noted there is a push/pull between educating individuals in a specific role to perform particular duties in a response when there may be months or years between their training and their need to perform. There is concern about retaining knowledge and ensuring that it is most relevant for a person’s role, and speakers cautioned that just-in-time may be too late in some events.

The session closed with the moderator asking each speaker where we should be headed in disaster health education and training. Speaker 4 noted that health professionals should be engaged in creating operational teams with specific skills. Speaker 3 advocated for investment in initial, basic education and then ensuring funding for training once health professionals are in the workforce. Speaker 2 described a need to change the culture of preparedness by requiring that professionals demonstrate disaster health knowledge on qualification tests, like boards. Finally, the moderator encouraged the disaster health workforce to be visionary and think about flexible innovation.