Developing an Emergency Preparedness Plan: One Local Health Department's Approach

Trainer
Christa Singleton, MD, MPH, Baltimore City Health Department

Description
Local health departments are now charged with developing emergency preparedness plans in the post-9/11 world. All politics are local, all disease is local and all emergencies are local. However, the process does not have to seem too daunting—after all, in terms of public health emergencies throughout history, local health departments have “been there, done that” and addressed the public’s needs. The challenge now is to be able to create plans that can expand or contract on a 24 hour/7 day a week basis using your existing staff capacities. This training product will help you explore ways to identify hidden preparedness capacities in the staff skill sets you currently have, ways to prepare your entire staff for the preparedness adventure and give you real-world examples from the perspective of a local health department.

Trainer
Christa-Marie Singleton, MD, MPH, is currently the chief medical director for the Baltimore City Health Department’s Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response. She is the executive medical/clinical advisor to the Baltimore City Health Commissioner and Baltimore City's Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response, coordinating all emergency preparedness and response operational activities respective to infectious disease outbreak activities, clinical procedures and protocols, medical screening, isolation and quarantine, prophylaxis and adverse events. Prior to this, she was the inaugural director of public health emergency preparedness at the Baltimore County Department of Health. In this role, she created, coordinated and implemented all public health preparedness and response activities within the Department and for area health and law enforcement partners.

Prior to coming to Baltimore County, Dr. Singleton held senior policy analyst positions at several Washington, D.C., organizations and also worked nights and weekends as a pediatric emergency room physician. Dr. Singleton received her BS in Microbiology from the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind., her MD from the University of Louisville in Louisville, Ky., and her pediatric residency training at the Thomas Jefferson University and the duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Del., and Philadelphia, Pa. During her pediatric residency training, she began her studies toward a master's in public health at the then Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, commuting nights and weekends from Delaware to Baltimore and Washington, D.C. She completed the final phase of her MPH in 1996 while working as a pediatric emergency room physician.