News Releases

The Center for Health Affairs Emergency Preparedness Initiative Awarded Federal Grant

The Northeast Ohio region will receive $785,676 in federal funding during the upcoming fiscal year to support the hospital emergency preparedness initiative. The funds, which come through the Ohio Department of Health, are the latest allocation from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

This latest grant brings the total level of funding for the emergency preparedness initiative to roughly $16 million over the last 15 years. This year’s funding is just slightly less than last year’s hospital emergency preparedness funding of almost $797,000, which at the time had reversed the years-long trend of declining annual awards. The majority of funds will be distributed to hospitals for their own training and equipment maintenance needs, with individual hospital grants ranging from $8,000 to $20,000, as in previous years.

While hospitals are the recipients of the funding, the benefits of the federal grant program ripple through the community, touching the many non-hospital entities that have recently become a part of the regional emergency preparedness coalition as required by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

“The advent of the CMS Conditions of Participation has increased the healthcare coalition numbers exponentially,” said Beth Gatlin, RN, MA-HSM, ASPR project director, The Center for Health Affairs. “Those agencies that were not surveyed on their preparedness plans for disaster in the past are now being integrated into the healthcare community with the ability to glean insight into planning and response from those hospitals that have years of experience.”

While the grant funding cannot be used to assist those facilities in becoming compliant with the federal Medicare requirements, those organizations will benefit from grant-funded training and exercises, which are available to them for participation.

For more on The Center for Health Affairs’ Emergency Preparedness initiative, contact us.