As part of ongoing work to protect Americans’ health and shore up emergency response systems, federal officials recently released the first National Health Security Strateg to protect health during a large-scale emergency.
The strategy, announced by U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in January, sets priorities for the next four years and outlines 10 objectives to achieve health security, addressing health threats such as bioterrorism and natural disasters.
“As we’ve learned in the response to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, responsibility for improving our nation’s ability to address existing and emerging health threats must be broadly shared by everyone — governments, communities, families and individuals,” Sebelius said. “The National Health Security Strategy is a call to action for each of us so that every community becomes fully prepared and ready to recover quickly after an emergency.”
In addition to calling for collaboration from the individual to the federal government level, the strategy also stresses the need for “better coordination between the health system and the emergency response system; ultimately, these systems need to work together as part of one integrated national health security system.” And achieving national health security also relies also on acknowledging the nation’s “interdependence with other countries on a global level,” according to the strategy.
While federal legislation directed the HHS secretary to develop the National Health Security Strategy and implementation plan and revise the documents every four years, HHS plans to update them every two years to reflect advances in public health and medicine.
“Events which threaten the health of the people of this nation could very easily compromise our national security,” Sebelius said. “In order to be prepared to both respond to an incident and recover, we need a strong national health system with individuals and families ready to handle the health effects of a disaster.”
The full strategy and an implementation guide are available at www.hhs.gov/disasters.
- Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
