To view this site you need Adobe Flash Player and your browser must allow javaScripts. Go here to get the latest Flash Player. A BETTER WAY OF BUYING cines to patients during a severe public health emergency. Rx Response’s partners include the drug and biotechnology manufacturing and distribution industries, as well as hospitals and community pharmacies. As Hurricane Ike made landfall near Galveston, Texas, Rx Response intensified its activities. Key actions included facilitating information flow about pharmacy re-openings to federal and state officials and alerting federal and Texas emergency management officials about a pharmaceutical distribution center in Stafford, Texas, at risk of running out of diesel fuel for its generators, which potentially threatened to spoil the medicines stored there. Other emergency functions carried out by Rx Response included disseminating information regarding emergency protocols for credentialing and providing access to impacted areas for workers supporting critical infrastructure restoration, providing temporary licensing provisions for out-of-state healthcare providers responding to the disaster and emergency prescription authorizations for evacuees and others impacted by disasters. region to act as facilitators. “In the past,” she said, “it was really more a question of states and localities handling emergencies, and then if/when they found they were overwhelmed, the federal government would ‘swoop’ in.What we’ve learned is that coordination and integration of planning and response is something you have to build from the grassroots.” One means of better coordinating state preparedness strategies, while maintaining flexibility for local autonomy, according to FEMA Acting Assistant Administrator for Disaster Operations Robert Francis Powers, has been the development of a “gap analysis,” which is a diagnostic tool to enable each state to assess its capabilities in emergency response across all the key disciplines, from logistics to procurement to asset and inventory management to evacuation. The “gap analysis” was inaugurated for the 2007 hurricane season to provide FEMA and its partners, at both the state and local levels in the hurricane-prone regions along the Atlantic and the Gulf coasts, with a snapshot of asset gaps to determine the level of federal support potentially needed in responding to a Category 3 hurricane. Seven critical areas were incorporated for review in the gap analysis tool in order to better understand asset response gaps in debris removal, commodity distribution, evacuation, sheltering, interim housing, medical needs and fuel capacity along evacuation routes. The goal of the self-assessment tests, according to Powers, is to have states do an ongoing self-assessment for continuous improvement, with FEMA as an active resource providing guidelines and benchmarks. “The dialog has to be happening all the time,” he said, “not just when the crisis unfolds.” In addition to self-assessment, FEMA provides states with a guide to setting up distribution points and offers a state-oriented training course. “We went out and looked at best practices in every area,” Powers said. “The object is to enable states to have an informed perspective on exactly what areas need to receive the most investment and to have the data they need to figure out how to prioritize their budgets. The actual investments are their responsibility.” FEMA’s key document outlining current strategic thinking for the federal government’s own approach to preparations procurement is the SLG 101: Guide for All-Hazard Emergency Operations Planning (http://www.fema.gov/pdf/plan/slg101.pdf), published on May 28, 2008. The document represents a key shift, according to Powers, in its increased commitments to forming private sector partnerships by locating expert contractors who will be in charge of acquiring, storing and moving emergency supplies. Critical to making this logistics strategy work is anticipating the need for disaster response supplies and services and having contracts in place to support response activities before a disaster occurs. To accomplish this, FEMA has over the past three years launched and expanded its Office of Acquisition Management (OAM) to emphasize the integral role of the acquisition function in strategic planning by dramatically increasing the number of prepositioned contracts to support disaster response activities. FEMA in 2007 began to assemble new national and regional response teams, called Incident Management Assistance Teams (IMATs), to ensure FEMA’s capability to immediately deploy qualified and experienced personnel and capabilities in support of any Strategic shifts in FEMA procurement The rethinking of preparations procurement in Florida and other states parallels strategic shifts occurring on the federal level, especially at FEMA. “We’ve needed since Katrina to learn to engage far more deeply and proactively from the planning stage level with people we didn’t engage with deeply historically,” Nancy Ward, FEMA acting administrator, told Homeland Security Today. 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