This product is part of the RAND Health working paper series. RAND working papers are intended to share researchers' latest findings and to solicit additional peer review. This paper has been peer reviewed but not edited. Unless otherwise indicated, working papers can be quoted and cited without permission of the author, provided the source is clearly referred to as a working paper. RAND's publ...

The 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) exposed serious limitations in Canada's ability to respond to a public health emergency. Considerable progress has been made since SARS in addressing these limitations, including the creation of the new Public Health Agency of Canada. A remaining contentious question is whether there is a need for new federal emergency public health ...

In recent years, growth of international travel and trade, as well as climate change, has resulted in the frequent emergence and reemergence of infectious diseases such as Ebola, Zika, and MERS. In 2016, Taiwan used the Joint External Evaluation (JEE) tool to evaluate its public health emergency response capacities and understand important areas for improvement. This article presents Taiwan's d...

Nunavut’s government “shall immediately declare suicide a public health emergency,” and appoint a Cabinet minister responsible for suicide prevention, recommended a coroner’s jury in Iqaluit. The territorial government should appoint the new minister by its next sitting and add a secretariat with “the mandate and the resources to demonstrate the Government’s commitment to this crisis,” by April...

O March 27, 2014, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick declared the state’s opioid-addiction epidemic a public health emergency. The declaration empowered the Massachusetts public health commissioner to use emergency powers to expand access to naloxone, an opioid antagonist that can reverse overdoses; develop a plan to accelerate the mandatory use of prescription monitoring by physicians and ph...

This article summarises the findings of recent work on local authority public hospital services in England and Wales in the inter-war years and identifies the lack of a robust hypothesis to explain the variations found, particularly one that would explain the actions of county councils as well as county boroughs. Using public policy techniques on a group of local authorities in the far South We...

Although outbreaks of Zika virus (ZIKV) were previously reported in Africa and Asia, it was not until multiple cases were detected in Brazil in 2015 that ZIKV captured public attention.1 The association with congenital disease prompted the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a public health emergency (lifted November 2016). We aim to explore the rapid translation of diagnostics for ZIKV ...

journal of law, medicine & ethics Introduction Among the many components of legal preparedness for public health emergencies is the assurance that the public health workforce and its private sector partners are competent to use the law to facilitate the performance of essential public health services and functions.1 This is a significant challenge. Multiple categories of emergencies, stemming f...

Since 9/11, public health has seen a progressive culture change toward a 24/7 emergency response organizational model. This transition entails new expectations for public health workers, including (1) a readiness and willingness to report to duty in emergencies and (2) an ability to effectively communicate risk to an anxious public about terrorism or naturally occurring disasters. To date, howe...