Preparedness and Business Planning

We in the southeastern US are anxiously watching three hurricanes coming our way. Hanna, Ike, Josephine… like unwanted old friends coming to visit, we’ve seen this before. Did you know that the skills of public health business planning are applicable to disaster planning?

This application can be direct: some teams every year tackle a preparedness problem in their plan. We write in the book about a Virginia team that created a plan to train childcare management and workers in disaster preparedness and create a certification program for that. Another team developed a disaster preparation training program for faith-based organizations interested in helping special needs groups, such as the blind, or those who do not speak English. That more recent team included a Spanish-speaking member as their community partner and envisioned working with the State Bioterrorism Department, local emergency centers, and local businesses to develop this program.

The application can also be indirect: in December, 2001, MAPH evaluation staff surveyed MAPH graduates to see whether and how their training had an impact on their ability to do terrorism and disaster-related work post-9/11. Of the 74% of respondents who said they did such work in their jobs, 90% said that MAPH contributed to their ability to respond. Now, MAPH teaches a lot more than writing a business plan, but the list of things respondents gave as having contributed to their ability includes much that goes into writing a business plan. They listed:
- partnerships, networking and negotiations
- communication, including presenting and writing plans
- planning, including strategic and business planning
- managing people, including delegation and team building
- managing projects
- personal confidence, including management, leadership and priority-setting

On a related note, in an article in Public Health Reports (122:1, Jan/Feb 2007), some of our colleagues at the NC Institute for Public Health compared preparation for two hurricanes: Hurricane Floyd in 1999 and Hurricane Isabel in 2003. They looked at the capacity building activities in the intervening years to see whether there was a correlation between having undertaken these activities and doing a better job preparing for the later hurricane. Surprise! There was – and, among other things like infrastructure development, the capacity building activities are the kinds of things we talk about every day. One important example is partnership building. In this case, partnerships among state and local agencies, health care facilities, businesses, and professional associations involved in preparedness and response. These are the kinds of people you are talking with about your own business plans. Whether or not you are talking about disaster planning, you are talking, getting to know each other, building trust and advancing relationships. When you do turn to disaster planning, you'll have a lot in place with which to work.

I can’t link to the article here, but you should read it if you can. It has the somewhat unwieldy (yet informative) title, “Evaluation of Public Health Response to Hurricanes Finds North Carolina Better Prepared for Public Health Emergencies” by Davis, MacDonald, Kline, and Baker.

Enjoy! And wish us luck with our “visitors” over the next few weeks.

-- Anne Menkens