Medical Crisis Preparedness

A major concern for employers during times of communicable disease outbreak is how best to protect their people.  Loss of essential personnel to illness can have a devastating impact on business.  In most cases, it is not practical to prevent exposure to airborne viruses or bacteria by having employees work at home, nor can employers identify and isolate people who may be infected, but not yet manifesting symptoms, before they can infect others.  It therefore becomes necessary to provide employees with both the guidance and the means for maintaining health in the workplace.

In April 2009, businesses, schools, governments, health organizations, and individuals across the globe were focused on the potentially devastating spread of the Influenza A H1N1 virus. While the virus has proven to be, at least at the time of this writing, less severe than originally thought just a few weeks earlier ORC believes there is value in examining and learning from the collective company responses during one of the more critical weeks of the virus’s evolution.

During the past two years, ORC has been working with county health departments in California to encourage business participation in the CDC Cities Readiness Initiative (CRI). This is a federally funded program to prepare major U.S cities to effectively respond to a large scale public health emergency within a short time frame. There has been increased interest generated in this program due to the recent swine flu outbreak.