Public Health Emergency Preparedness

The Emergency Preparedness Program at Essex County focuses on enhancing preparedness at county level along with LHDs. The program works to enhance community resilience by ensuring that county and local health departments are ready to effectively respond to a large-scale public health incident. We need to ensure we are best prepared to provide medical countermeasures such as medications, vaccines, and diagnostics that may be needed to lessen the effects of a public health emergency. This requires planning, preparing, discovering proper methods to dispense appropriate medical equipment and collaboration with LHDs, hospital systems, Emergency Medical Services (EMS), Office of Emergency Management (OEM), epidemiologists, nurses, community organizations etc. By combining all these efforts, we will be able to make an Emergency Operations Plan (EOP) to assist us in any future emergencies.

The ECOPHM receives funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) through the State of New Jersey that uses the LINC’s grant to make creating such an extensive plan possible.