A Comparative Study Of Beijing City, District, And County CDC's Capacities In Public Health Emergency Preparedness And Response In 2004 And In 2007, Beijing, China.

BackgroundPublic health emergencies refer to the events that occur unexpectedly and can cause or potentially cause mass destruction to the public's health, including epidemics of public health importance, diseases outbreaks in the large population with unknown causes, large scope food poisoning and occupational poisoning, and other events that can severely affect public's health. Public health emergencies have many characteristics which have a great impact on social development and human health. These characteristics are sudden outbreaks, impact on public, seriousness, complexity, and volatility. Currently, much attention has been paid to global emerging infectious diseases. The public health emergency management system is under the process of gradual development and construction. Its main contents include: prevention and preparedness, monitoring and early warning, information report, emergency response, and coping with the consequences. The evaluation of the emergency response capabilities is the feedback and summary of the public health emergencies prevention and management, which goes through the whole process of the public health emergency management events. Its major purpose is to test the completeness and coordination of the response related administrations on the major components of human sources, organizations, agencies, methods and sources, etc in the face of public health emergencies, and to tell whether or not the related administrations possess the general capacities to reduce the damage to the minimal extent. So, the evaluation of emergency response and preparedness capabilities is the most important elementary work of public health emergency management. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are the professional and technical ones to handle with public health emergencies, and their capacities directly determine the success or not of the prevention and control of public health emergencies. After SARS outbreak, the Chinese government clearly aims to construct the disease prevention and control system which could cover the whole country and possess corresponding functions in three years. Furthermore, Beijing is the host city of 2008 Summer Olympics, Beijing Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will play a critical role for the security of the Olympics. To date, no report in china on comparative study of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention capacities in Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response at different times has been found. Therefore, it is of great significance to evaluate the changes of capabilities of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing especially after three years of public health system construction since the SARS epidemic.Objective1 to compare the preparedness and response capacities among Beijing City, District, and County Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on public health emergency in 2007, to find out capabilities gap among the centers and to identify the influencing factors;2 to compare the preparedness and response capacities among Beijing City, District and County Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on public health emergency in Beijing in the year of 2004 and 2007, and to find out whether or not their capabilities improved, and to identify the influencing factors to improve the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention capacities.MethodologyThis study is conducted to evaluate the capabilities among Beijing City, Districts and Counties Centers for Disease Control and Prevention using cross-sectional survey method, based on the literature review results. We evaluate and compare the capacity changes among Beijing centers for disease prevention and control after three years' building on public health system to cope with public health emergencies using descriptive epidemiology to analyze the 2004 and 2007 surveys.ResultsCompared with year 2004, the overall level of capabilities to deal with public health emergencies in year 2007 were improved among Beijing City, Districts, and Counties Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The biggest improvement in capacity was the capabilities on emergency reporting and information dissemination, followed by laboratory capacity, education and training capacity, surveillance and epidemiological capacities, and contingency plans making and preparedness capacities. However capacities on participating in regional preparedness and response were slightly decreased compared to those of 2004.Conclusions After three years of public health system' building, the overall level of public health emergency response and preparedness capacity of the Beijing Disease Prevention and Control institutions has been really raised.