Preparing the CDC Public Health Workforce for Emergency Response

A critical component of successful public health emergency responses is the availability of appropriate numbers of personnel with emergency response expertise. To achieve this, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) focused on strengthening training, personnel database systems, and responder outreach. To ensure availability of well-trained public health emergency responders, CDC and external partners coordinated training, planning, exercise, and evaluation activities; established the School of Preparedness and Emergency Response; and implemented Responder Training Tiers for response roles with defined functional competencies. For personnel information, CDC developed interoperable databases to streamline the search for specific staff expertise for a response. To improve responder outreach, CDC developed various mechanisms to efficiently identify and assign potential responders to responses. These measures work together to sustain a qualified workforce for public health emergencies, and may be helpful to other public health agencies for staffing and training of their response workforce.