The Institute of Medicine (IOM) established a Forum on Medical Preparedness for Catastrophic Events (the ?Forum?) in 2007. IOM forums are designed to provide its members with a venue for exchanging information and presenting individual views, and allow a structured opportunity for dialogue and discussion while scrutinizing critical and possibly contentious scientific and policy issues. Representatives from government, industry, academia, and other interested parties are expected to serve on the Forum, which will convene two to three times a year to confer on subject areas of mutual interest and concern. At its meetings, the Forum will identify and discuss emerging scientific research and policy required to improve the Nation's public health and medical preparedness, response, resilience, and recovery to acts of terrorism and/or natural disasters, as well as issues in the coordination of federal, state, local, public, and private medical preparedness and resilience activities. The Forum will sponsor workshops as an additional mechanism for informing forum meetings and discussions. The Forum may also commission individually-authored papers on select topic areas. Forum discussions or workshops may lead to proposals for specific studies by units of The National Academies resulting in institutional reports. Such studies, if undertaken, will be conducted independently and kept at arms length from the Forum and in accordance with all institutional policies and procedures governing such study activities.
Examples of the activities the Forum on Medical and Public Health Preparedness for Catastrophic Events -- with mixed federal, academic, not-for-profit, and industry for-profit participation -- can engage in includes: workshops on topics of interest to Forum members and symposia held for the purpose of informing Forum members more widely on topics related to public health medical preparedness, response, resilience, and recovery. The Forum can also serve as a locus for informing each of its members of the views and plans of other members approaching similar challenges. Specific activities will be organized according to the following tasks: 1. Forum Meetings. Forum Meetings will be held two to three times a year. They will be open and attended by IOM staff and Forum members. 2. Workshops Sponsored by the Forum. The Forum will convene workshops on topics in which it needs to be informed. The Projected Costs shown at the end of the proposal includes two workshops each year. Workshops will be open to the public and Forum members. 3. Individually authored summary documents or proceedings of the Forum's workshops and symposia may be published by the National Academies Press (NAP) or posted on the National Academies website. 4. Commissioned Background Papers and Authored Background Papers. For some topics, the Forum may need to be informed through expert technical presentations or other specialized evidence and analysis to adequately explore or discuss a topic of interest. In such cases, the Forum will commission signed papers from a technically qualified expert or scientific and technical writer or organization. These papers may be posted on the Forum website and published separately as an authored background paper presented to the Forum.
