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June 29, 2021 (Cleveland, OH)

The Center Receives Hospital Preparedness Program Grant for Fiscal Year 2022

The Center for Health Affairs was awarded $796,993 in federal funding to support ongoing healthcare emergency preparedness work for the 2021-2022 grant year, which begins July 1. Funding comes through the Hospital Preparedness Program, which is administered by the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness Response (ASPR), an office within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This is the 19th consecutive year of grant funding awarded under this federal grant initiative, which has facilitated work that proved to be a crucial foundation to the hospitals’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic over the last 18 months.

This year’s funding will be used to incorporate new processes that emerged and lessons learned during the pandemic into the Regional Infectious Disease Annex which will be part of the Northeast Ohio Healthcare Coalition Regional Emergency Response Plan. This work, which will be done in concert with public health partners, will bring together the infectious disease response and planning work completed prior to and just in time during the COVID response. Given the common threads identified that ran through the response by every healthcare facility in the region, the Infectious Disease Annex will be tailored to fit virtually any infectious disease that would bear a surge response from hospitals and healthcare facilities in the future. For example, this annex will incorporate the Ebola Response Plan, which has been a significant area of planning concentration for the last few years by the healthcare coalition. 

Grant-funded activities also include completion of a Coalition Surge Test in the fall, which will offer several hospitals the ability to evaluate their evacuation plans along a timeline to arrange transportation and find beds for the whole hospital census. In the spring of 2022, a tabletop exercise is planned to test the new Infectious Disease Annex, which will afford the healthcare coalition participants a review of the new plan and to offer suggestions for improvement.

For more on The Center’s hospital emergency preparedness planning work, contact us.