Reimagining Emergency Preparedness and R

COVID-19 challenged traditional ideas of “public health preparedness” and exposed tragic gaps in the way institutions and societies prepare for and respond to public health emergencies. The next century will be inundated by further pandemics, climate-driven crises, and other threats.  This requires reimagining our approach to prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery from such threats.

This course will combine federal doctrine, sociology, public health analysis and ethics/philosophical approaches to describe a reimagined approach to the field of Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response (PHEPR). Students will leave ready to participate productively in public health emergency activations in governmental or healthcare contexts. Students will also understand the likely limitations and failures of these emergency activations. Finally, students will be able to practice new and imaginative problem solving techniques suitable for these unstable conditions.

The course will accomplish this in three broad sections. In Unit One (covering the first three sessions), the course will wrestle with what these events that we call “public health emergencies” actually are, where they come from, and how they change us. In doing this, the course will propose a new conception of a “public health disaster” to align emergency management and public health scholarship.

Armed with this knowledge, in Unit Two (the second three sessions) the course will cover specific management practices for general disaster response, public health response, and preparedness activities. Through critique of these frameworks and the proposal of alternate evidence-based techniques (e.g., surging solidarity, mindful muddling, parasitic resilience), the course will build reimagined methods for handling these acute events.

Finally, in Unit Three (the last session), the course will apply a “wicked problems” framework to critical issues within the public health emergency space, asking students to use the frameworks they’ve learned in pragmatic problem solving activities.

Throughout, the course will offer the perspectives of public health practitioners, community leaders and scholars in envisioning the transformation we need and describing the paths to make these changes we need  a reality. In conversation