This project is a part of a larger pandemic preparedness program consisting of five distinct but highly collaborative and complementary projects that will provide an important advance in the protection of the human infrastructure essential to insure continuity of critical activities within communities of various sizes.

CHR’s project will examine the best practice and currently available materials to craft a preparedness guide and step-by-step playbook of community-level pandemic preparedness planning. The guide will be targeted primarily to medium and smaller sized communities to assist with their pandemic preparedness planning, but could easily be applied in more urban areas as well. The goal is to offer a guide and a standardized process and planning approach that can be easily adapted at the local level and modified according to local practices, resources, capabilities and intent.

The development of community based workshops will provide an opportunity to work directly with communities and take them through the planning process and guide. Feedback from the training will improve the guidance materials and the content on the web portal. Training modules and materials will be developed. Feedback from each training experience will be used to improve the documents and training modules. As communities are trained, material will be developed to make the presentation materials available for download or streaming from the web portal.

Funding Source: National Institute for Hometown Security (NIHS)

Timeframe: March, 2009 – March, 2012

Project Faculty: David M. Simpson, PhD, AICP (UofL), PI;  Josh Human, Associate Director (UofL)

Project Staff Lead: Will Bruer, MPH, MPA, Research Facilitator (UofL)

Other Participants: UofL School of Public Health, Kentucky Department of Public Health