Public Health Emergency Management of Disease Prevention and Control in Thailand

Abstract

Background: At the present, public health emergency especially the large outbreak of communicable diseases and emerging infectious diseases has occurred more often and widely affected the society, politics and economics. Thus, the preparedness plan of public health emergency management and disaster management should be well planned. The objective was to characterize public health emergency management of disease prevention and control in post-disasters in Thailand.
Methods: The study was the documentary research. The methods were 1) to review literatures about the public health emergency, public health emergency management, post-tsunami active disease surveillance, post-disasters disease prevention and control, and tsunami and big flooding in Thailand documents 2) to collect the data and to analyze all gathering data using thematic analysis and 3) to discuss the results in order to provide the recommendations for disaster management and public health emergency management.
Results: There was no record of processes or results of prevention and mitigation and preparedness steps according to occurring of the tsunami and big flooding unpredictably at that time. There were processes and results of response including disease surveillance, investigation and disease prevention and control. In addition, there were processes and results of recovery including the transferring the active surveillance system to normal routine disease surveillance and there was no definite after-action review of all events related to tsunami or big flooding response to improve the plans and activities.
Conclusions and discussions: There was no prevention and mitigation and preparedness steps, but there were the steps of response and recovery. There was no preparedness and strategic plan for disaster in Thailand before the events. Therefore, there was no steps of prevention and mitigation and preparedness phases. However, the actions of post-Tsunami disease prevention and control could be categorized as in response phase of disaster management cycle. In recovery phase, there were transferring of the active disease surveillance to the routine disease surveillance. However, there were no actions of mitigation and prevention and preparedness phases since there was no previous plan for disaster management. Recommendations: the public health emergency, disease surveillance and disease control and prevention management should be integrated into the disaster management cycle. In addition, national strategic and preparedness plan, action plan, incident action plan for public health emergency events, or public health disaster should be developed and implemented under the umbrella of disaster management cycle framework.