About the course:

This course is designed to develop an understanding of the concepts of public health as they relate to disaster management. The student will apply Noji’s five phases of a disaster to actual public health disaster events during the last 25 years. The course will focus on what preparedness actions are necessary to safeguard the health of citizens and emergency personnel during a disaster event, as well as public health disaster response and investigation. Public health issues in disaster management that are covered include water and food supply disruption and contamination, waste disposal, environmental pollution and infectious disease outbreaks. The basic principles of epidemiology and health surveillance will also be reviewed.

Homework:

MaHIM appears complicated but it mirrors the standard ICS matrix in terms of its design. There are five sectors: Command, Operations, Logistics, Planning and Admin/Finance. However, the system is not actually a roadmap for assigning persons to perform tasks. Rather, it is a map whose purpose is to remind an incident manager of all the tasks which much be accomplished during a complex health emergency and it groups those tasks into functional sectors.

Assignment: Read both MaHIM and the Public Health ICS document. Create between 10-15 Powerpoint slides discussing: (1) the difference between MaHIM and the public health ICS, (2) the major functional subgroups contained within the sector of your choosing, (3) critical actions for the first 24 hours of an incident from the public health perspective, choosing from: category 5 hurricane in Miami, NYC subway terrorist bombing, large earthquake in urban center in northern California, massive explosion at a chemical factory, or Y. pestis (plague) outbreak in Washington DC. Remember to describe your answer in terms of public health emergencies, not fire-rescue incident types.

You will find the assigned reading in the attachment.

Slides should have no more than 4-6 lines of text per slide, and 1-3 ideas per slide max. Text should be in bullet format, not paragraph/prose format. Information should be conveyed in a concise but comprehensible manner. Do not write too much, as this creates a crowded slide which is visually overwhelming. Your meaning will get lost in the slide and your audience will lose interest. Do not write too little as this makes it difficult to understand your intended meaning. You may receive a lower grade because it will not be clear that you understood the concepts. Use photos and diagrams thoughtfully to supplement and advance your presentations, not just as meaningless filler.

Each presentation should have a title slide, an objective slide and one or more reference slides. The title slide should contain the title of your presentation, your full name, the date and course #. The objectives slide should outline the main bullet points that your presentation will cover. These should be analogous to lessons you expect your intended target audience to learn from your presentations. Your target audience has a basic disaster management background equivalent to your own. You do not need to include background material such as the history of ICS in your presentation.

The number of slides will be assigned for each presentation. The student may go above that number by 2-3 slides but may not go below the assigned number. The assigned number of slides does NOT INCLUDE the title, objectives or reference slides. It also will not include slides with pictures or diagrams unless those slides substantively advance the presentation. This means that if this were a live presentation you would spend at least one minute discussing that picture/diagram. If you use photos or other multimedia in your presentation and it is not your own work (i.e., you took it from the internet) you MUST reference it on the slide (as opposed to the references slide at the end.