New HPP Capabilities Emphasize Healthcare Response

​The new capabilities sharpen the focus of the HPP on acute healthcare service delivery and emphasize that preparedness and response are critical to ensuring the public’s health during emergencies and disasters.

Contributed by John Hick, MD; Melissa Harvey, RN, MSPH; and Dan Hanfling, MD

​The Hospital Preparedness Program (HPP) cooperative agreement is preparing to enter a new project period in summer 2017, to complement the newly-released 2017–2022 Health Care Preparedness and Response Capabilities. When it was originally launched in 2002, HPP concentrated on hospitals and emergency response. Over time, the focus shifted from hospital-based acute care to the importance of community-based planning and response activities, centered on the development of health care coalitions (HCCs). HCCs are groups of individual healthcare and response organizations, such as hospitals, EMS, public health agencies, emergency management, and others that have a stake in healthcare delivery in a geographic region. While individual HCC members are often competitive healthcare organizations with differing priorities and objectives, as a coalition they work together to ensure that each member has the necessary real-time information, medical equipment and supplies, communication systems, and healthcare personnel to respond to an emergency. 

The new capabilities sharpen the focus of the HPP on acute healthcare service delivery and emphasize that preparedness and response are critical to ensuring the public’s health during emergencies and disasters. The four capabilities were constructed in an additive fashion—in other words, the first capability, Foundation for Health Care and Medical Readiness, can help HCCs and their individual members develop the architecture, processes, and plans necessary to building an interdisciplinary, collaborative approach to emergency preparedness and response in order for the remaining capabilities to be effective. Ultimately, building the capabilities will enable HCCs and their members to save lives, reduce suffering, and ensure the public’s health following sudden, no-notice or sustained disasters.

To read more about each of the capabilities, please refer to pages 13-15 of ASPR TRACIE's Newsletter The Exchange: Issue 3- "New HPP Capabilities Emphasize Healthcare Response".