Survey's average is more than an hour
By Cheryl Clark
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
January 9, 2008
How fast do public health departments nationwide respond to medical practitioners' alerts that a patient has a serious infectious disease such as smallpox or meningitis? Or to a doctor who thinks he's seeing the first symptoms of anthrax from bioterrorism?
Not very. In fact, the average response time could be dangerously slow, according to a new study from the Rand Corp.
Researchers found that only one-third of the 74 participating agencies consistently connected the reporting doctors or nurses with a qualified ?action officer,? such as a public health nurse or epidemiologist, within 30 minutes.
Even fewer could do so within the 15-minute time frame recommended by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The report listed an average response time of 63 minutes, and some agencies took nearly 17 hours to call back. It ranked a third of the health departments as poor because one or more of their reply calls came more than four hours after the alert.
?A lot of health experts will tell you one hour is too long,? said David Dausey, who wrote the study and is a professor of public health policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
The CDC spends up to $1 billion annually to support anti-bioterrorism and emergency-response efforts for public health departments, including about $5 million for the agency in San Diego County. It's considering whether to tie future funding with performance benchmarks such as the one tested by Rand.
?The overall message is accountability . . . to assure that these funds do lead to critical improvements,? said Dr. Richard Besser, the CDC's director of terrorism preparedness and emergency response.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services paid for the Rand survey, which will be published in the February issue of the American Journal of Public Health.
Dausey said agencies that called back quickly had people handling their hotlines at all times and regularly tested their response systems. Those that performed poorly used recorded messages and did not conduct routine checks.
San Diego County's health department wasn't asked to join the survey, said Dr. Wilma Wooten, the county's public health officer. The region's emergency system always has a person answering the phone for medical experts to report an infectious disease, she said.
From January to June last year, the average time for connecting a county health expert with a health provider registering an alert was four minutes, Wooten said. The maximum wait was 13 minutes, she added.
By Cheryl Clark
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
January 9, 2008
How fast do public health departments nationwide respond to medical practitioners' alerts that a patient has a serious infectious disease such as smallpox or meningitis? Or to a doctor who thinks he's seeing the first symptoms of anthrax from bioterrorism?
Not very. In fact, the average response time could be dangerously slow, according to a new study from the Rand Corp.
Researchers found that only one-third of the 74 participating agencies consistently connected the reporting doctors or nurses with a qualified ?action officer,? such as a public health nurse or epidemiologist, within 30 minutes.
Even fewer could do so within the 15-minute time frame recommended by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The report listed an average response time of 63 minutes, and some agencies took nearly 17 hours to call back. It ranked a third of the health departments as poor because one or more of their reply calls came more than four hours after the alert.
?A lot of health experts will tell you one hour is too long,? said David Dausey, who wrote the study and is a professor of public health policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
The CDC spends up to $1 billion annually to support anti-bioterrorism and emergency-response efforts for public health departments, including about $5 million for the agency in San Diego County. It's considering whether to tie future funding with performance benchmarks such as the one tested by Rand.
?The overall message is accountability . . . to assure that these funds do lead to critical improvements,? said Dr. Richard Besser, the CDC's director of terrorism preparedness and emergency response.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services paid for the Rand survey, which will be published in the February issue of the American Journal of Public Health.
Dausey said agencies that called back quickly had people handling their hotlines at all times and regularly tested their response systems. Those that performed poorly used recorded messages and did not conduct routine checks.
San Diego County's health department wasn't asked to join the survey, said Dr. Wilma Wooten, the county's public health officer. The region's emergency system always has a person answering the phone for medical experts to report an infectious disease, she said.
From January to June last year, the average time for connecting a county health expert with a health provider registering an alert was four minutes, Wooten said. The maximum wait was 13 minutes, she added.