About the Preparedness Summit

About the Preparedness Summit

About the 2024 Conference Theme

A successful working relationship between the public health, healthcare, and emergency management sectors is critical to public health and medical emergency mission success. Most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the vital importance of collaboration among public health, emergency management and healthcare.  Across these sectors, the strengths of existing relationships vary and the language each sector speaks is different—making collaboration more difficult. Also, how each sector employs various response systems such as ICS was evident. 

At the same time, challenges faced by our communities grow—with multiple emergencies occurring simultaneously and the impacts of each compounding. How can public health, emergency management, and healthcare work to strengthen their partnerships in support of communities? The time is now to talk about it, examine response systems, and take steps to deepen relationships.  

The theme of the 2024 Preparedness Summit, “Public Health, Healthcare, and Emergency Management: Aligning to Address Cascading Challenges,” will provide an opportunity for sectors to come together, align missions, and discover better ways to work as true partners. By investing in these partnerships now, we can build connections that enhance our individual and collective capabilities and readiness for ongoing and future response and recovery.  

About the Preparedness Summit

The Preparedness Summit is the first and longest running national conference on public health preparedness. Since its beginning in 2007, the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) has taken a leadership role in convening a wide array of partners to participate in the Summit; presenting new research findings, sharing tools and resources, and providing a variety of opportunities for attendees to learn how to implement model practices that enhance the nation’s capabilities to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters and other emergencies.

Over the last decade, the nature of threats to our national health security have changed significantly. As professionals in the public health preparedness space, we can expect these threats to continue to evolve. It is imperative that we adapt our public health practices to meet the demands of an ever-evolving threat environment. But how do we, as preparedness leaders, help our communities become more prepared to respond to and recover from uncharted catastrophic events? We can start doing so by discovering new and creative solutions to address events like pandemic diseases, the opioid crisis, active shooter emergencies, and cybersecurity threats.

Each year, the Preparedness Summit will feature experts from the healthcare and emergency management fields in addition to public health preparedness professionals to address the gaps between these life-saving industries in an effort to work more collaboratively and efficiently in the face of emerging threats. Reaching across these sectors will leverage diversity of thought and advance the capacity of our communities to respond to and recover from emergency events. We hope that this conference will provide an opportunity to build stronger partnerships and encourage us to find innovative solutions with our allies.

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2023 Preparedness Summit

What 2023 Preparedness Summit attendees had to say about the experience:

"The summit provided a plethora of information and tools to help public health professionals do their job. I offered opportunities to network with and learn from professionals."

"I felt this year's Preparedness Summit was a breath of fresh air. I believe the future of public health and health care preparedness lies in greater coordination, collaboration, and communication. By ensuring aspects of both public health and medical preparedness are represented in each session we can build stronger partnerships and create a more resilient nation."

"The 2023 Preparedness Summit was a valuable learning experience and I plan to incorporate the lessons and practices I observed into our health department program. Networking with organizations and agencies was an important aspect of...the event...as it allowed attendees to exchange ideas, learn from each other's experiences, and build relationships that can be beneficial in future emergencies."

"I really appreciated the thoughtfulness that the conference planners put into this summit."