Using Formal and Informal Networks in Environmental Health Emergency Response

Although well prepared and trained, Environmental Health professionals are constantly challenged by responding to new or different situations. Often, demanding scenarios come during an emergency, when having access to existing materials, checklists, resources and best practices can assist in appropriate and rapid situational assessment and response.

In these economic times, many agencies are faced with reduced resources and multi-tasking personnel, which create a manpower gap in routine duties, and also an increasing need for competent environmental health personnel in emergency and disaster response. Shrinking staffs and budgets may also hinder the ability to locate or create an essential tool to assure public health and prevent or mitigate a current situation. Often, the needs or resources that an EH professional is seeking already exists, but locating such resources can be difficult in the midst of emergency response. Integrating informal connections and personal contacts into an environmental health professional's toolbox helps address this gap, and can expand one's ability to respond promptly and adequately to a community's emergent environmental health needs.

United by a common professional passion, environmental health professionals can trade insights and provide resources and best practices that are timely and appropriate to emergent response needs. Using formal and informal networks, professionals can create newfound ways to significantly cut the time and cost involved in developing or procuring needed environmental health materials by increasing the pool of experience that they could draw upon, tapping insights from different disciplines, and recycling design ideas from other projects. Such relationships and reciprocity have demonstrated improved and timely practice in emergent situations such as Hurricane Irene sheltering, flood related environmental response, pre-disaster connectivity, the sharing of trainings and fact sheets, and dissemination of public emergency information and warning messages.

This panel presentation of EH experts will provide examples of actual situations where formal and informal networks expedited the accrual of needed policies and resources to immediately enhance emergency EH response. This session will also provide the opportunity for attendees to create an applicable and convenient resource and contact list that will be a valuable and usable tool to take home from this AEC.