Shasta County

Global Consulting was contracted by Shasta County, California in to assist Public Health pandemic leaders with a multi-phase training and exercise program, “Expanding the Continuum of Care During a Pandemic Influenza Surge”. This was a year-long, state-wide program, designed to strengthen community partnerships and support healthcare in the event of an influenza pandemic.

For the first phase of the project, Global facilitated a tabletop exercise in Redding, California that was attended by 47 participants from many health care and emergency response agencies. The exercise was in late April, 2009, during the county’s local H1N1 response. Due to these circumstances, the exercise was re-developed to incorporate status reports and activities of current international, national, and local pandemic response, with the original exercise objectives, to improve coordination and communications between health and emergency partners in the region.

After communications processes were improved as a result of the tabletop, the next step was for Global to work with Public Health and a multitude of local hospitals and health care clinics to develop a functional exercise to further test their response plans and procedures.

The results included the opportunity for over a dozen health care facilities, many emergency response organizations and government executives across the county, to participate and test their abilities within the three target capabilities identified for the exercise: communications, intelligence/information sharing and dissemination, and medical surge.