| The Application of the Haddon Matrix to Public Health Readiness and Response Planning Daniel J. Barnett, Ran D. Balicer, David Blodgett, Ayanna L. Fews, Cindy L. Parker, and Jonathan M. Links Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health Preparedness, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, USA Abstract
State and local health departments continue to face unprecedented challenges in preparing for, recognizing, and responding to threats to the public's health. The attacks of 11 September 2001 and the ensuing anthrax mailings of 2001 highlighted the public health readiness and response hurdles posed by intentionally caused injury and illness. At the same time, recent natural disasters have highlighted the need for comparable public health readiness and response capabilities. Public health readiness and response activities can be conceptualized similarly for intentional attacks, natural disasters, and human-caused accidents. Consistent with this view, the federal government has adopted the all-hazards response model as its fundamental paradigm. Adoption of this paradigm provides powerful improvements in efficiency and efficacy, because it reduces the need to create a complex family of situation-specific preparedness and response activities. However, in practice, public health preparedness requires additional models and tools to provide a framework to better understand and prioritize emergency readiness and response needs, as well as to facilitate solutions ; this is particularly true at the local health department level. Here, we propose to extend the use of the Haddon matrix--a conceptual model used for more than two decades in injury prevention and response strategies--for this purpose. Key words: dirty bombs, emergency, Haddon matrix, injury prevention, preparedness, public health, readiness, response, SARS, terrorism. Environ Health Perspect 113: 561-566 (2005) . doi:10.1289/ehp.7491 available via http://dx.doi.org/ [Online 2 February 2005]
Address correspondence to D. Barnett, Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health Preparedness, 615 N. Wolfe St., Room WB030, Baltimore, MD 21205 USA. Telephone: (410) 502-0591. Fax: (443) 287-7075. E-mail: dbarnett@jhsph.edu The development of this manuscript by Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health Preparedness was supported in part through a cooperative agreement U90/CCU324236-01 with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The authors declare they have no competing financial interests. Received 16 August 2004 ; accepted 2 February 2005.
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