About

Welcome to the Marion County Public Health Emergency Preparedness website. The purpose of this website is to prepare for, respond to, recover and mitigate – in both the short and long terms – from public health incidents. We do this by engaging and coordinating with Department of Public Safety, Division of Homeland Security, emergency management supporting agencies, healthcare organizations (private and community-based), mental/behavioral health providers, community and faith-based partners, state, local, and territorial resources.

The public health’s role in community preparedness is to do the following:

• Support the development of public health, medical, and mental/behavioral health systems that support recovery
• Participate in awareness training with community and faith-based partners on how to prevent, respond to, and recover from public health incidents
• Promote awareness of and access to medical and mental/behavioral health resources that help protect the community’s health and address the functional needs (i.e., communication, medical care, independence, supervision, transportation) of at-risk individuals
• Engage public and private organizations in preparedness activities that represent the functional needs of at-risk individuals as well as the cultural and socio-economic, demographic components of the community
• Identify those populations that may be at higher risk for adverse health outcomes
• Receive and/or integrate the health needs of populations who have been displaced due to incidents that have occurred in their own or distant communities (e.g., improvised nuclear device or Tornado)

Protecting the public from health threats involves public health preparedness as well as medical preparedness. Both are essential for national health security and, hence, to the overall preparedness of the nation. Public health preparedness is the ability of the public health system, community, and individuals to prevent, protect against, quickly respond to, and recover from health emergencies, particularly those in which scale, timing, or unpredictability threatens to overwhelm routine capabilities. Medical preparedness is the ability of the health care system to prevent, protect against, quickly respond to, and recover from health emergencies, particularly those whose scale, timing, or unpredictability threatens to overwhelm routine capabilities. Medical preparedness generally is the responsibility Healthcare system.