Isolation & Quarantine
Community Partners

Core Elements of Planning


PLANNING CONSIDERATIONS IN PARTNERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
Partner Recruitment Strategies. Recruiting community organizations as partners requires a strategic approach. We used the following strategies to engage partners in our I & Q planning process:

• Find allies. Ask internally for help in developing new relationships. Find out whom in your department or among your existing contacts might have relationships with desirable partners. Determine who may have influence with potential partners.


• Take the perspective of the potential partner. Consider: What is at stake for me? How could I &Q preparedness align with my mission? Could emergency preparedness elevate my visibility in community? Would participation in I & Q preparedness impact my funding? Use the Things to Think About Before Meeting with Community Partners worksheet to help you take the perspective of a potential partner.


• Convey the urgency of emergency preparedness. This can be done using data from disease outbreaks in other areas that is listed on the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention Web site or predictions about the potential for Public Health emergencies in your area.


• Don't be deterred if a potentially important partner initially declines to participate. Ask yourself, Is this agency absolutely necessary to engage? If the answer is yes, then keep hunting for allies or for a new angle that will interest that organization. Also, keep in mind that the key is how to motivate a partner to participate, not how to coerce them into involvement. A coerced partner may create more difficulty in the long run.


• Avoid putting someone in a position where they can say no. Instead, give them the opportunity to say, not right now or let me think about it.

PARTNER PLANNING SESSIONS
A series of facilitated planning sessions were conducted to formally solicit community input on isolation and quarantine plans. Participants included a wide range of emergency managers, health care providers, social service organizations, and other stakeholders that had a responsibility for ensuring public safety or who could provide vital services during a Public Health emergency.

The planning sessions enabled us to formulate an I & Q Response Plan that reflects a broad scope of action steps as well as encouraged community acceptance of the Plan itself. Learn more about the details of how to develop Partner Planning Sessions in your jurisdiction.

ESSENTIAL SERVICES OF PUBLIC HEALTH
Public Health agencies are vested with the legal authority to isolate or quarantine people for the good of public health. This stretches Public Health's responsibility beyond its core competencies and resources, requiring Public Health to depend on community partners to do what they do best in coordinating the emergency response and comprehensively caring for those who are confined.

Learn more about the National Association of County & City Health Officials operational definition and local health department standards of a local governmental Public Health agency. This definition describes a shared understanding of what people in any community, regardless of size, can expect their governmental Public Health agency to provide at the local level.

TABLETOP EXCERCISES
Tabletop (TT) exercises were created to test the emerging I & Q plan with community partners. TT exercises are tools used in emergency management to gather individuals who play a role in emergency response in an informal, low-stress setting to analyze simulated emergency situations.

During a TT exercise, a facilitator presents a detailed, hypothetical emergency scenario and participants talk through what they would do (guided by the emergency response plan). Along the way, participants thoroughly discuss each step of their response, offering their reactions and raising questions and issues that might arise in that situation. Tips for developing and delivering TT exercises and a sample TT presentation are included in the Tools & Samples section.

One of the challenges in creating a TT exercise is to determine the scope of what is to be tested. We wanted to test the parts of the I & Q response plan that involved community partners. We developed a TT exercise to only test specific aspects of our I & Q plan for that scope. Desired outcomes of the TT exercise were to determine answers to the following questions:

• Did our community partners have the capacity needed to provide non-medical services to quarantined individuals?


• Are Public Health and the community partners able to communicate so that all necessary information is effectively conveyed between them?


• Are all involved agencies able to protect client confidentiality and maintain consistent public health messages?

Ultimately, the TT exercises allowed us to assess the community partners' capacities, and just as important, we were able to identify issues that we hadn't yet anticipated.

KEY STEPS IN PARTNERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
This section provides a broad look at the process of implementing Partnership Planning Sessions. Learn more about implementation steps using the Tips for Implementing the Partnership Planning Process and the Tools & Samples.

The purpose of the Partner Planning Sessions was to:

• Provide essential background information on disease outbreaks, define I & Q, explain the role of Public Health in responding to disease, and describe best practices.


• Propose community roles and responsibilities for an I & Q response and ask for input from partners.


• Provide opportunities for small and large group discussions on I & Q planning issues.


• Solicit input from community-based partners on how best to respond and plan for an I & Q event.