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U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response

This issue of The Express highlights the following resources:

• ASPR TRACIE Roundtable: Lessons Learned in Health Care Communications (Webinar)
• Updated Risk Communications and Social Media in Emergency Response Topic Collections
• Mass Casualty Hospital Capacity Expansion Toolkit
• Extreme Heat Events: Lessons from Seattle’s Record-Breaking Summers
• No-Notice Health Care Facility Water Loss: HCA Houston Healthcare Tomball’s Experience (Speaker Series Recording)

In honor of Earth Month, we invite you to access our climate change resources: 

• Climate Change and Healthcare System Considerations Topic Collection
• Climate Change Resilience and Healthcare System Considerations Report
• Climate Change Resilience and Healthcare System Considerations Webinar

For additional climate change information visit the HHS Office of Climate Change and Health Equity webpage and reach out to us if you need technical assistance.

ASPR TRACIE Roundtable: Lessons Learned in Health Care Communications

During this webinar, speakers representing a wide range of stakeholders and jurisdiction types (national, large/urban, regional, and rural/tribal) shared how they are integrating lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic and recent incidents into current and future responses. Topics covered in Lessons Learned in Health Care Communications included channels used for outreach and continued engagement, strategies for reaching different community and cultural groups, tracking and countering rumors, and working with partners to create complementary messaging. 

Updated Topic Collections 

To complement our communications webinar, ASPR TRACIE worked with subject matter experts to comprehensively update the Risk Communications/Emergency Public Information and Warning and Social Media in Emergency Response Topic Collections. Of note, both Topic Collections now feature a “Misinformation and Disinformation” section. 

Mass Casualty Hospital Capacity Expansion Toolkit

Mass casualty incidents (MCIs) generally occur without warning. This concise, scalable surge response template can be a helpful quick reference to the hospital personnel tasked with expanding care capacity in the first hours of an MCI and can minimize ad hoc and potentially conflicting decisions about prioritization of space and strategies. The template includes four sections to guide emergency department, general inpatient, critical care space expansion, and basic additional staffing needs during patient surge.

Extreme Heat Events: Lessons from Seattle’s Record-Breaking Summers

Triple digit temperatures are affecting areas of the U.S. that historically never experienced them, including the City of Seattle, where home and facility air conditioning is rare or is not designed for extreme temperatures. Extreme Heat Events: Lessons from Seattle’s Record-Breaking Summers features health care stakeholders sharing how lessons learned during the 2021 heat dome incident and robust regional and local collaboration and communications during the pandemic facilitated connections during the heat wave in the summer of 2022. 



No-Notice Health Care Facility Water Loss: HCA Houston Healthcare Tomball’s Experience (New Speaker Series Recording)

Jake Marshall (Senior Director of Enterprise Emergency Operations, HCA Healthcare) and Toni Carnie (Safety Officer & Emergency Management Coordinator, HCA Houston Healthcare Tomball) discuss facility water loss considerations and their system's response and recovery from Winter Storm Uri in this recording.

This speaker series also includes recordings on how Lee Health prepared for, responded to, and recovered from Hurricane Ian and the 2022 long-term water outage that impacted the City of Jackson, Mississippi. Access the Healthcare System Preparedness Considerations speaker series recordings to learn how the health care field is incorporating lessons to continuously improve patient care and bolster provider and system resilience.

Updates from the Office of Critical Infrastructure Protection

ASPR’s Office of Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) offers a variety of newsletters to keep stakeholders informed during emergency response and steady state. The newsletters inform stakeholders of the most significant issues facing the Healthcare and Public Health Sector including cybersecurity, health care supply chains, COVID-19, and more. If you are interested in receiving CIP newsletters, visit the CIP newsletter subscription webpage.