News Releases

Helping Hospitals Identify Gaps, Prioritize $1.5 Million in Emergency Preparedness Funding

The Center for Health Affairs, the leading advocate for Northeast Ohio hospitals, is winding down a successful year of emergency preparedness work and gearing up for the next year of grant funding and ongoing preparedness planning.

Over the course of the funding year - which runs from July 1, 2010 to June 30, 2011 - the Northeast Ohio region received a total of $1,529,217 in emergency preparedness funding through the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), the division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services responsible for respondign to and preparing for public health emergencies.

Each member hospital’s funding allotment, which varied from $21,000 to $45,000, was based on the number of Emergency Department visits. Northeast Ohio is unique in that the majority of federal emergency preparedness funding received through ASPR flow out directly to member hospitals, as opposed to being retained by the hospital association.

During the funding year, hospitals completed their annual Hazards and Vulnerability Assessment (HVA) to help identify their emergency preparedness gaps and align spending plans with ASPR’s preparedness priorities. The Center has compiled the region’s HVA gaps, which include severe snowstorms/weather, tornados, mass casualty events and power failures.

Communication, exercises and training remain priority planning areas for the region’s hospitals. As part of the individualized consulting provided to members, The Center worked with each member hospital to review their HVA results and prioritize the use of emergency preparedness funding in order to improve each hospital’s emergency preparedness and ultimately to ensure the safety of hospital patients, employees and the facility.

If  you have comments, questions or suggestions about the region’s emergency preparedness funding, please contact Beth Gatlin at beth.gatlin@chanet.org or 216.255.3665 or Andrea Bishop at andrea.bishop@chanet.org or 216.255.3662.