Tabletop Exercise for Pandemic Influenza Preparedness in Local Public Health Agencies

Designing and conducting tabletop exercises to assess public health preparedness for manmade and naturally occurring biological threats

“…This exercise was tested in three local health departments in different states. Greater detail on the structure for these tabletop exercises as well as the tabletop exercise templates themselves can be found elsewhere [7,17].…”

“…Recognizing the need to exercise public health emergency response, and enabled by funding and directives from CDC and HRSA, health departments throughout the US have implemented exercise programs. These exercise programs have had varying goals, including building relationships among stakeholders [7,8], training staff [9][10][11], and evaluating preparedness levels [12,13], and they have been used for a variety of purposes, including to identify gaps in preparedness [14], make recommendations for improving preparedness [15], and identifying variations in preparedness across health departments [16]. These exercises have involved diverse groups of stakeholders involved in public health preparedness, such as representatives from public health [17], health care [18], agriculture [19], and emergency medical services [20].…”

Community Planning for Pandemic Influenza: Lessons From the VA Health Care System

“…To date, there are no validated, objective methods for quantitative measurement of exercise performance or for benchmarking progress in pandemic preparedness over time. 8 Many hospitals and health departments report anecdotally that public health preparedness planning and exercises serve to strengthen their core, day-to-day functions, and expand their relationships with other community partners around issues beyond preparedness. We hope that this model of VA-community exercises can be a first step toward greater collaboration and improved population health in a pandemic emergency or in routine care.…”

“…Working closely with stakeholders throughout VA, we designed the exercises based on a previously developed approach. 7,8 We developed separate exercises to examine salient issues at each organizational level within the VHA: local facilities, VISNs, and VACO. First, by reviewing VA's National Pandemic Influenza Plan, stakeholders identified candidate preparedness topics for inclusion in the exercises.…”

The Utility of Table-Top Exercises in Teaching Nuclear Security

“…The available literature on TTX provides for a number of different "models" that can be followed, according to the complexity of the planned exercise and available resources [13]. As a minimum, however, the following roles should be identified: The division of roles and responsibilities presented above is only indicative and may not apply in every circumstance.…”