Valued Voice

Health Care Emergency Readiness Planning: HHS Child and Adolescent Health Emergency Planning Toolkit Available

Note: as part of its role in facilitating the exchange of information between health care partners, WHA is running a series of articles highlighting the emergency planning resources available on ASPRTRACIE.hhs.gov.

An updated HHS Child and Adolescent Health Emergency Planning Toolkit is available on asprtracie.gov. This toolkit helps emergency planners consider how they will address the needs of children and youth with special health care needs (CYSHCN), as well as families and caregivers in emergency preparedness, response, recovery, mitigation and community resilience activities.

The toolkit is intended for health care, public health, and social services providers serving CYSHCN and their families/caregivers. The toolkit contains approaches, resources, and practices to help providers coordinate and integrate systems of care for CYSHCN and their families/caregivers. The goal of this toolkit is to reduce the heavy burden of emergency planning that often falls on CYSHCN families/caregivers during an emergency response event.

There are four modules included in the toolkit. Module 1 focuses on preparedness, including walking through considerations in setting up an emergency response plan, such as partners, data, communications strategy, and determining how to cater a response plan to individuals, families, caregivers, and systems of care. Module 2 focuses on response, including how providers and partners will execute their plan, including coordination for continuity of care, provision of shelter, and support to meet basic needs and medical requirements. Module 3 focuses on recovery, or how the community will restore services and infrastructure on a long-term basis in the aftermath of an emergency. The final module covers case studies that walk through how response plans would work for various individuals considered to be CYSHCN.

As mentioned in the toolkit, CYSHCN are characterized as children having family-identified service needs, severe chronic clinical conditions, functional limitations, and high utilization of health resources. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, these children make up nearly 20% of all children and are present in nearly 1 in 4 U.S. households.

You can find the toolkit here.