Public Health Emergency

The Lawrence-Douglas County Health Department works with local partners to ensure that local public health capacities are in place to address large-scale disease outbreaks, illness or bioterrorism events in Lawrence and Douglas County.

Services provided:
• Preparedness and response planning and risk assessments
• Communication enhancement between public health and response partners
• Increased capacity to conduct epidemiological and surveillance activities
• Exercising our public health emergency response plan

A communicable disease nurse's story

Incident command is a new concept for public health. In recent years, we have taken the required courses, but until being able to use it in real life, it didn’t make a lot of sense.
Now, we try to apply it whenever we can, to make it feel more natural when it comes to an actual “event.”
In March of 2006, we received word that Lawrence
had some mumps cases. In the five years prior, we had no confirmed cases of mumps in Douglas County.
As the number of cases began to increase, we decided to activate the Incident Command Center and develop an incident action plan. This helped us manage the event more efficiently and was a command process that made sense.
By the end of the outbreak, we had 339 confirmed and probable (epidemiologically linked) cases of mumps.

See also Medical Reserve Corps (MRC)