Hospital emergency departments are a critical part of the U.S. health care system, providing the only guaranteed source of health care for the uninsured and offering around-the-clock health care access to everyone. In 2006, more than ten million visits were made to California hospital emergency departments. Heavy use of emergency departments, including use by patients seeking treatment for nonu...

The goal of Emergency Medical Services for Children (EMSC) is to reduce child death and disability due to both injury and illness. EMSC addresses the entire continuum of pediatric emergency services, from prevention and emergency medical service (EMS) access through prehospital and emergency department care, intensive care, rehabilitation, to reintegration into the community. The US Congress pa...

Objectives: Since 9/11, Incident Command System (ICS) and Emergency Operations Center (EOC) are relatively new concepts to public health, which typically operates using less hierarchical and more collaborative approaches to organizing staff. This paper describes the 2009 H1N1 influenza outbreak in San Diego County to explore the use of ICS and EOC in public health emergency response. Methods: T...

Emergency department has always been a problem for the health system in most countries (1). In Iran, organizing hospital emergency has been on the agenda since the start of the 10th government cabinet, as poor services and delays in attending to emergency patients had led to patient dissatisfaction and a major cause of complaint from hospital emergency departments(2). Furthermore, considering t...

Large-scale public health emergencies require a sophisticated, coordinated response involving multiple entities to protect health and minimize suffering. However, the rarity of such emergencies presents a barrier to gathering observational data about the effectiveness of the public health response before such events occur. For this reason, public health practitioners increasingly have relied on...

Some jurisdictions have reduced workforce and reallocated responsibilities for public health preparedness and emergency management to more efficiently use resources and improve planning and response. Key informant interviews were conducted in six counties in North Carolina (USA) to discuss perceptions of the challenges and opportunities provided by the new shared positions. Respondents feel tha...