The USF PERLC, in partnership with the Sarasota County Community Organizations Active in Disasters (SC COAD) and other partners in the Florida Department of Health will develop and deliver community preparedness and response system training based on the highly developed system in Sarasota County. The curriculum will reflect the activities in Sarasota County that led to the strengthening of county level preparedness and response capability. The training will also be based on the ASPH Public Health Preparedness and Response Core Competency set. The purpose will be to train representatives of other counties so that they can return to their home counties and initiate or strengthen their county preparedness and response systems. USF PERLC and SC COAD representatives have drafted a set of curriculum topics and identified core competencies that relate to the topics. The target audience will be mid-level professionals who came as teams from other counties and who represent community organizations such as public health departments, county governments, not-for-profit and for-profit organizations, faith-based organizations, hospitals, and school districts. The training will be provided through distance learning methods and three days on-site in the Sarasota County Health Department. USF PERLC staff and staff from SC COAD organizations will serve as faculty. Four introductory trainings will be offered in the first year to up to six county teams of approximately six people each. Another four introductory sessions will be offered in year 2 of the project to new county teams and four follow up sessions in advanced community preparedness and response systems training will be provided to the teams who participated in year 1. This pattern will be repeated in years 3-5 of the project. The Florida Center for Public Health Preparedness (FCPHP) has developed and uses a Learning Management System (LMS) with many training capabilities (e.g., course posting, registration, pre-test and post-test, distribution of certificates, permanent individual records of training). The data base serves as an important evaluation resource. The USF PERLC, in partnership with the Florida Department of Health (FDOH), will also develop and deliver partner-requested preparedness and response training. The letters of support from senior Department of Health officials have identified a preliminary set of priority training areas. The requested areas include several that the Florida Center for Public Health Preparedness niche areas, including disaster behavioral health and field epidemiology. Representatives of the FDOH units will serve in an advisory committee to refine the requests for training, prioritize them, identify subject matter experts to assist in curriculum development, review curricula and training material and methods, and participate in the evaluation of the training and the USF PERLC performance. This is the model followed by the current FCPHP and praised in the letters of support. This aspect of USF PERLC activities will also use the LMS and to the extent the priorities of the FDOH are for training already provided by the FCPHP, the current manuals, training aids, evaluation instruments, and other resources can be modified and training initiated relatively early in the first project year. Most of the USF PERLC staff has extensive and relevant experience through working with the FDOH on training as staff of the FCPHP. The principal investigator and other staff will participate fully in the PERLC network activities.
