The People, Power, and Pride of Public Health provides an engaging overview of the incredible accomplishments and promise of the public health field. The first module includes interviews with legendary public health figures whose work led to millions of lives saved with vaccines, air bags and car seats, and the federal Women Infants and Children (WIC) nutrition program. The second module brings key public health tools to life -- including use of data, communications, and policy - through discussions with experienced professionals who have used these tools to save lives. The third module includes a "Carpool Karaoke"-style trip through Baltimore County, Maryland with NACCHO President Dr. Umair Shah to see and hear real public health workers talking about how they serve their communities. Learners will come away from this course with a deeper understanding of the public health field and a greater enthusiasm for their own work in public health. Preview the course on YouTube: goo.gl/RXKbUr
Terry: Emergency Preparedness
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From the course by Johns Hopkins University
The People, Power, and Pride of Public Health
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From the lesson
People: Public Health in our Communities
In this module, Harris County Health Officer Dr. Umair Shah drives “carpool karaoke”- style around Baltimore County, Maryland to hear from real health department workers about their work.
Meet the Instructors
Beth A. Resnick, MPHAssociate Scientist
Health Policy and Management
Joshua Sharfstein, MDAssociate Dean for Public Health Practice
Terry. Hey, how are you?
Hey, how are you doing?
I'm well.
You're looking prepared.
Always prepared.
How are you?
Dr Scholl.
Oh, nice to see you.
Pleased to meet you.
Terry Sapp, I love it.
So I have one preparedness-related gift for you.
Oh, all right.
Are you ready?
I'm ready.
Bottled water.
Hey, there you go.
There you go. You're going to stay hydrated.
Fantastic.
Where are we? What is this place?
We're at the Randallstown Community Center.
Okay.
And this is one of many community centers that we have in Baltimore County.
Okay.
And this is what we call, Building of Opportunity.
It's county-run, it's county-operated.
So if we had an incident where we required
a large open space to do anything from an emergency shelter or a point of dispensing...
A pod.
A pod.
Something like that.
Mass antibiotics or vaccinations,
Randallstown has a Building of Opportunity that we can use.
And in fact during H1N1,
we used Randallstown Community Center
numerous times to give mass vaccinations to the public.
Is that right?
Yes we do.
So it's not just in theory, this is practice.
In practice.
Wow that's great. So you have your seatbelt on?
Got my seatbelt on.
Got water?
Got water.
We got that bag.
We got the bag.
With the zombie outbreak,
we're ready for that. So ready to go?
Rock on.
All right, let's do it.
Tell me Terry what part of town are we? Where are we?
Randallstown is the west side of Baltimore County.
Okay.
Baltimore County is geographically one of the largest counties in Maryland.
We have about 830,000 residents, about 330,000 households.
That's amazing.
And we have everything from urban to cow country.
So we're passing...
I want to get to that in a second.
Sure.
We're passing a Home Depot here.
It just reminds me of businesses and
doing all sorts of outreach in partnership with the private sector.
I'm assuming that you work with large stores like that.
Absolutely.
Is that right?
Not only that, but we focus a lot also
on what we consider our county critical infrastructure.
We're looking right now at the biggest employers in Baltimore County.
So for us those are our hospitals,
obviously, which are critical infrastructure to the healthcare system,
as well as Medicaid,
CMS, Social Security Administration that has a campus with over 20,000 employees on it.
Wow!
So obviously, if we know we've got a large number of people already in one place
and they're doing something that is going to be critical and
essential especially after a public health emergency,
we want to keep those folks where they are.
So it just makes sense to get a closed pod.
A point of dispensing.
A point of dispensing.
Good.
Give them, you know,
the medications that they need to take care of
their own people and they do the dispensing for us.
So what you're saying is that you're in the midst of
an emergency and a horrific emergency where
we're really thinking that something has happened and we need to
dispense antibiotics to every single individual in the community.
Correct.
Every single one. And now we have a police officer.
What's this gentleman doing here?
We have a trash can on the road it appears.
A trash can on the road?
Okay, so we're talking to Terry here.
Terry, large-scale biological events and we just witnessed
That's a small-scale event.
a police officer turn on his lights
and remove a trash can from the middle of the road.
The hazards medication.
There you go, so you know, I guess that reminds all of us that emergencies can be huge,
large-scale, community-wide, nationwide, but they can also be very small.
They can. And you know we've always said with public health,
we're the third partner.
We're the quiet partner.
You know you have health and security emergency management and public health.
You know the other two as you just saw are very visible.
Sure.
You know if something happens,
the police respond. They're visible.
If there's a fire, if there's a car crash,
the fire department is there. They're visible.
Public health we're kind of invisible.
You know when a disease happens or the outbreaks happen or if
there's a white powder that's being sent out to the lab,
we're not visible to the public,
but we're still doing a lot of work behind the scenes.
You know when we do our job, really well,
we're kind of invisible in the sense that you don't see us.
I think you know, you bring up a really good point.
So that police officer,
and as you know law enforcement are one of our dear partners,
as he flashed his lights, got out of the car,
had his uniform on and removed the trash can,
the cars behind I'm sure had a glimpse of this law enforcement officer,
this police officer is serving the community.
Right.
If Terry was driving just a regular car,
opens up... Now you're pretty
geared up--you've got pockets and you've got all sorts of things.
We have to have a little bit of everything.
That's right.
[inaudible]
Right. But the majority of
public health professionals if they walk out they would remove that
trash can and nobody would even know that that person is public health, see?
Right, here. Here's a trash can. Why don't we...
It must be a bad trash can.
Yeah, why don't we... Okay Terry, let's do it.
Here we go.
All right, let's get Terry out here.
Let's see. Let's show this is public health in action.
Oh a lot of the other cars are leaving.
Come on, watch this guy.
Just because he doesn't have... Oh come on. All right.
All right Terry. All right.
I'm going to clap for you.
I appreciate that. Look at you.
I've done my civic duty there.
Look at that. I don't know, the public did not see that,
but I saw it.
See, once again the invisible partner of the health department.
You were just as successful as that officer was.
And yet nobody saw, and yet.
There you go.
You, it's a thankless job.
Well you know if a trash can falls in
the road and no one's there to see does it really happen?
Oh, we have a philosophy now.
So your job is to protect the entirety of this county.
All of this.
Which means you've got to be very facile,
very nimble with urban areas,
with rural areas, with forested areas,
with park areas, with you know, all the above.
Everything. And it means from an emergency planner perspective,
you can't sometimes run your operations
in a rural area the way you would run them in an urban area.
Okay. Tell me how.
So you know it may be just they have different traffic patterns,
they have different characteristics.
So for example, a pod or an emergency shelter that is
in a very densely populated part of our county,
you're going to have a lot more people reliant on public transportation.
I see.
So you have to make sure those locations, the pods,
the shelters that they're located along bus routes,
along places that we can easily get to.
Up in our Herefords zone in cow country, everyone drives.
So public transportation is not so much an issue there,
but you know you might have to consider,
is it a road that is easily accessible to all types of vehicles?
You know, Are you going to have enough parking
because those pods might have more vehicles coming to it than a more urban pod.
I see.
So there are a lot of considerations.
A lot of considerations.
That you have to take into account.
How big is your team?
My team is the,
you know, the Little Engine That Could.
We only have about four of us, in fact.
Okay. That being?
Public health emergency preparedness.
Okay. All right.
And the four of us responsible for,
you know all of the emergency planning and the logistics,
and in many cases running the actual emergency operation.
So four people.
Four people, four of us that do the...
Yeah.
...readiness piece of it.
Okay.
However, you know our partners are pretty much every person in the health department.
Oh, okay.
So we have the communicable disease division that's
responsible for those outbreaks and investigations.
We have environmental health.
That was like I met Derrick earlier.
You met Derrick earlier.
Okay.
Our environmental health are our partners as well.
Okay.
For recovery, you know we have all of our folks in behavioral health that we rely on.
And here's the magic of it.
Yeah.
Is that when something does happen,
we can, you know,
with the declaration of a public health emergency,
we can essentially make all of our Health and Human Services staff emergency essential.
So the Little Engine That Could,
the four people in fact,
suddenly become a force of twelve hundred.
Wow.
And that doesn't include as well our partners with the police department,
our partners with the fire and emergency management,
DPW, anything that's significant
Our healthcare community hospitals.
Hospitals are significant public health emergency.
It's it's all hands on deck and it's all agencies together.
You know, I cannot end any conversation with Terry without asking about the pants.
And you know.
I guess I was wearing them. I was wearing pants
So I'm glad.
They told me I had to wear pants for this. So.
The question I have is,
you've got lots of pockets.
I got lots of pockets.
And you, you look like you're
prepared and when we first got in the car you got in the car.
I saw something about zombies.
So tell me, are you ready for a zombie apocalypse?
I don't think we're ever ready for the zombie apocalypse. You know.
Yeah.
Although interestingly the CDC did
a zombie apocalypse plan just
to encourage people to get interested in emergency preparedness.
Is that right? Wow.
They did. But you know for us,
it could happen at any time.
Yeah.
So I always try to make sure I have the basic tools that I would need at
any given time whether I have to go to the EOC, emergency operations center.
Sure.
You know if I've got an emergency on our headquarters and have to respond to that.
Yeah.
You know.
I've always got lights on me in case we have power outages.
That's right.
Which happen quite often.
You're definitely ready to go.
Ready to go.
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