The Public Health Workforce and Willingness to Respond to Emergencies: a 50 State-state Analysis of Potentially Influential Laws

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Spring 2014

Publication Title

The Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics

Volume

421

Issue

1

First page number:

64

Last page number:

71

Abstract

Law plays a critical role in all stages of a public health emergency, including planning, response, and recovery. Public health emergencies introduce health concerns at the population level through, for example, the emergence of a novel infectious disease. In the United States, at the federal, state, and local levels, laws provide an infrastructure for public health emergency preparedness and response efforts: they grant the government the ability to officially declare an emergency, authorize responders to act, and facilitate interjurisdictional coordination. Law is perhaps most visible during an emergency when the president or a state's governor issues a disaster declaration establishing the temporal and geographic parameters for the response and making financial and other resources available. This legal authority has increasingly been used during the last decade. For example, the number of federally declared disasters and emergencies rose from an average of 74 declarations per year in the 1990s to an average of 137 declarations per year in the 2000s.

Keywords

Communicable diseases; Disaster relief--Law and legislation; Disasters; Emergency management; Legal authorities; Medical laws and legislation; Public health

Disciplines

Community Health | Health and Medical Administration | Health Law and Policy | Medical Jurisprudence | Medicine and Health Sciences | Mental and Social Health | Public Health

Language

English

Permissions

Use Find in Your Library, contact the author, or interlibrary loan to garner a copy of the item. Publisher policy does not allow archiving the final published version. If a post-print (author's peer-reviewed manuscript) is allowed and available, or publisher policy changes, the item will be deposited.


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