Toolkits

School Safety Recommendations

This document was prepared as a resource to help BOHs in Massachusetts make evidence-based decisions regarding their positions on school reopenings in their towns and cities. The report can be tailored for individual towns and cities. This document used some town data specific to the Town of Wellesley. On March 8, 2021, the Wellesley BOH approved a two-page position statement entitled “Position Statement: Achieving Full In-Class Public School Education.” A copy of the Wellesley BOH Position Statement can be found here. Please feel free to use and modify the Word file to aid in drafting your BOH position statement.

Hospital Recovery Toolkit

This document was written for hospitals and is intended to serve as a resource for hospitals to use as they prepare to manage their recovery from emergencies of all types, intended to complement the ongoing efforts of federal, state, and local agencies that are similarly committed to enhancing health care recovery capabilities. This document draws from an extensive literature review, review of many hospital plans, multiple interviews with hospitals that have had to recover from major incidents, and from lessons learned during the execution and evaluation of the 2013 MDPH statewide hospital recovery workshop series. We gratefully acknowledge their contributions and the hard work that many hospital leaders have undertaken to develop and expand health care recovery capabilities across the Commonwealth.

Hospital Decontamination Toolkit

These resources have been designed to assist hospital-based contamination during all phases of the emergency management cycle. Each document can be used to facilitate improvement. However, the resources are most effective when used in combination. This toolkit includes a document, the purpose of which is to suggest common capabilities that all hospitals in Massachusetts should target in their provision of care to patients who may present to their facilities after contamination with hazardous substances. It also includes a document developed to provide a structured critique that hospitals may use when evaluating their decontamination plans and capabilities considering current regulatory standards, recommendations from subject-matter experts, and national and international best practices.

Hospital Evacuation Toolkit

This is a comprehensive guide that hospitals can use to prepare for and execute a hospital evacuation. It includes the 2014 edition of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (MDPH) Hospital Evacuation Toolkit. The toolkit is meant to serve as a resource for hospitals to prepare their own comprehensive evacuation plans, and also to review their provisions and planning for sheltering in place. The toolkit draws from extensive literature review, review of hospital plans, interviews with hospitals that have had to evacuate, and from other activities that occurred in preparation for the MDPH statewide hospital evacuation exercise program. It also includes organized and systematic guidance on how to consider the many factors that bear on the decision to order an evacuation.

Exercises Toolkit

This toolkit is an online resource to help you develop exercise evaluation forms for your disaster exercise. Public health and health care agencies will find this database helpful in developing exercise evaluation forms for the optimal evaluation of their preparedness exercises. You are able to download sample forms pertaining to the evaluation of your health care facility’s ability to evacuate patients, visitors, and staff in a timely and efficient manner, the evaluation of your response to a hazardous materials exposure or accident, and the evaluation of your health care facility’s ability to respond to a mass influx of patients. You are also able to log in or create an account, create your own form, or view helpful resources.

Peer Assessment Toolkit

This toolkit is to support collaborative efforts to learn from singular events. The peer assessment process is designed to engage public health and other professionals in the analysis of a public health system’s response to an emergency, by identifying root causes of successes and failures and highlighting lessons that can be institutionalized by the responding public health system and others to improve future responses. In this toolkit is information about: a definition of peer assessment, a rationale for peer assessment, the intended users of this toolkits, a glossary of terms, peer-assessment major components, initiating a peer assessment, master activities list, conducting a peer assessment, and how to conduct a facilitated lookback for public health emergency preparedness as well as other options for conducting an on-site meeting and root cause analysis.

Preparedness Logic Model

This report focuses on the development of a public health emergency preparedness logic model for the European context, particularly on cross‐border threats to health that can be used as the basis for identifying public health emergency preparedness (PHEP) systems’ current level of preparedness. The paper begins with a summary of the salient aspects of the European public health emergency preparedness context. The first section describes the role of logic models in the development of measurement and assessment systems, particularly in distinguishing between capabilities and capacities. The paper then proceeds to describe the method used for identifying both the critical capabilities and capacities in the European context.

Preparedness Core Competencies Model

This report was commissioned by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and focuses on the development of emergency preparedness core competencies in the European context. With the eventual goal of developing competency-based training programs intended to improve public health emergency preparedness (PHEP), the authors developed an ECDC public health emergency preparedness logic model. This logic model provides a structure for assessing preparedness in European Union member states and, in its list of public health emergency preparedness capabilities, a language for describing and identifying gaps in the knowledge and skills of public health and preparedness professionals.

Emergency Risk Communication Item Bank

The Emergency Risk Communication Item Bank was developed by the EPREP Program and provides a user-friendly platform for survey development. To build their survey, users may select items from six domains (awareness and knowledge, communication behaviors, emotional reactions, preparedness behaviors, risk perception, social and demographics factors), or select a pre-developed survey that was used in one of four real emergencies (2010 MA Water Crisis, 2014 West Virginia Water Crisis, 2009 H1N1 Pandemic, 2012 MERS Outbreak).