5. Summary
The history of public health is a succession of responses to emergencies, many of them related to sudden, large scale outbreaks of communicable diseases, including smallpox, cholera, salmonella, and HIV. At other times, public health response has been required because of disruptions in community resources during or following a hurricane, flood, earthquake or blizzard. In many communities, the public health agency is a well-established part of response to hazardous chemical spills or radiation exposures. Anyone working in public health for more than a year or two has probably participated in or observed a response to some emergency event.
The increased attention to strong, effective and efficient community-wide response to emergencies, whether unintended or deliberate, caused by nature or a human being, has led to the expectation that public health agencies become fully integrated into comprehensive emergency planning. This requires meeting the national standard for emergency preparedness and response, NIMS, which applies at all levels of government, and across all response sectors.
It is essential that public health officials work collaboratively to assure that the public health portion of a multi-agency response is smoothly implemented. For that to occur, the public health agency must be familiar with and use the standard incident command organizational structure in order to fit into the unified command at the city, county, state, or national level. A parallel command structure, using the same table of organization and position titles, is applied within the agency. PHICS provides public health leaders, emergency response coordinators and staff the practical guidance needed to smoothly apply ICS within public health.