About Pacific EMPRINTS

Welcome from the Program Director

Pacific EMPRINTS is a broad-based consortium of public and private health educators and health services providers that received funding from the U.S. Health and Human Services' Health Resources Services Administration (HRSA) late 2005. The program was transferred to the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) in March 2007. It is one of only 19 continuing education grants awarded across the nation, including Yale New Haven Health System, University of California San Francisco and Columbia University .

The project envisions a cadre of health professionals better equipped to recognize terrorist and other public health emergencies, to meet the acute needs of their respective populations, to more easily coordinate responses to terrorist events, and to quickly and effectively communicate threats and response to the public at the community, state and national levels. Our training will hopefully enhance the safety of both first responders and the communities they protect.

As part of the Pacific EMPRINTS curriculum, geographic information system (GIS) mapping and spatial analysis training will be offered to health professionals involved in management, preparedness and response to terrorist events and other emergencies. GIS training will include the standardized use of GIS for data collection, management and distribution in the field and command centers . Embedding GIS and global positioning system (GPS) technologies within health systems can dramatically enhance problem solving and decision making processes and assist health professionals in identifying and responding more effectively to terrorism and other public health emergencies.

We hope you will find this website useful and will be your future resource for up-to-date information. Uplinks to relevant news articles, links to additional online disaster preparedness information and dates and contact information for other Pacific EMPRINTS trainings and educational events will continually be updated.

Please feel free to contact us at emprints@hawaii.edu or at 808-956-0895 if you have suggestions for courses or to receive more information on future educational sessions.

Sincerely,
Ann Sakaguchi, MPH, PhD
Project Director

The Pacific EMPRINTS Program

We offer comprehensive, distributed training to reach a large, wide-ranging population of metropolitan and rural health providers in these areas and beyond to better fulfill the identified public health and medical needs/gaps and competencies for targeted disciplines of emergency medical personnel including physicians, nurses, dentists, mental health workers, pharmacists, veterinarians and para-veterinarians (for USAPI only). In response to common reports of fear, stress and low personal efficacy associated with performing their duties (Lanzilotti 2004), emphasis will be on first responder and public safety protocols.

Mission

Effectively addressing the health needs of a community resulting from large scale CBRNE (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, Explosive) incidents require many elements among which are: 1) a community-wide emergency management system and 2) the application of modern technology to assist professionals in the field. The Pacific EMPRINTS is committed to the development of an on-going continuing education program for health professionals focusing on these two elements.

The program’s mission is to ensure effective, efficient and highly synergistic health care services to the community in times of CBRNE incidents by providing healthcare professionals with knowledge of their roles and responsibilities as part of the community’s larger Emergency Operations Plan (EOP) and also sufficient understanding of map literacy and geographic information technologies applicable in their fields as well as those they interact with during these crises.

Goals

Our goal is to fulfill the public health and medical needs/gaps and competencies for targeted disciplines of emergency medical personnel including physicians, nurses, dentists, mental health workers, pharmacists, veterinarians and para-veterinarians.

We help health professionals to be able to:

1. recognize terrorist and other public health emergencies;
2. meet the acute care needs of the population, including vulnerable populations;
3. participate in a coordinated, multidisciplinary response to terrorist events and other public health emergencies; and
4. rapidly and effectively alert the public health system of an event at the community, state and national level.

Training Benefits

The distance learning courses will address awareness, recognition, performance and planning and management competencies. In addition to meeting these core competencies, we will include multidisciplinary training via: 1) a series of live, large-scale, multi-agency training events to be conducted on Oahu and neighbor islands, and 2) training of health professionals involved in management, preparedness and response to CBRNE events and other public health emergencies to be GIS and map literate through basic awareness and applied Geographic Information System (GIS), Global Positioning System (GPS), Mapping and Spatial Analysis classes.

Live training events provide an unparalleled opportunity for disaster management agencies to work and communicate together in response and recovery efforts following mock emergency scenarios. Live training events are crucial for identifying strengths and weaknesses within and among agency response personnel and protocols and better preparing and protecting all during a real event. For example, scenarios will include chemical (nerve agents), radiological and bioterrorism (e.g. Avian flu, swine flu, West Nile Virus).

The GIS-enhanced training is extremely useful for operational incident management. Basic geographic and map literacy is increasingly becoming an essential skill of health professionals, first responders and disaster managers - they must understand where an emergency or outbreak is taking place, where victims can be treated in relation to locations of health resources, what areas need to be evacuated and to where via what routes, and where personnel and equipment can be strategically and safely staged. Spatial information tools and technologies make the collection, use and distribution of spatial information easier, more systematic, more current, more accessible in the field and more standardized. GIS and GPS technologies are now being embedded in health systems in ways that can dramatically enhance problem-solving and decision-making and assist health professionals in identifying and responding more effectively to CBRNE terrorism and other public health emergencies.

This two-prong approach consisting of comprehensive, single and multidisciplinary training and information sharing will help ensure a better prepared, safer, more responsive, progressive and integrated public health and medical system in Hawai‘i, California and the USAPI.