Decision Making and Leadership in Public Health Emergency Response

HPM 580 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

Responding to a public health emergency requires quick decision making with limited and often imperfect information. Leaders must understand the substance of each decision, the available options, the anticipated downstream consequences – both inside and beyond the healthcare sector – and undertake a risk analysis with very little time for consideration or margin for error. Each leader, across the larger enterprise, is making their own series of decisions that interconnect with the larger effort – from commerce and travel to education and political blowback. Trusting your colleagues, your staff, and your gut – shaped by prior experiences – are critical elements to leading any response.  We intend this class to provide you a front row seat to the behind-the-scenes machinations of a response, demonstrating how important it is to ground yourself in the facts, to cultivate strong relationships with colleagues, and to surround yourself with staff that you trust.

In this short, fast-paced course we will look at three recent public health emergency responses – the 2022 global mpox outbreak, the 2022 Ebola Sudan outbreak in Uganda, and the 2024 H5N1 flu outbreak among dairy cows in the US – each virus has different incubation periods, transmission dynamics and posed different – albeit terrifying – risks to the US population. The US response to each of these outbreaks utilized many different parts of the federal government but they all shared the common challenge of swift decision making – in the context of intense uncertainty – and collaborative leadership skills. You will learn about both the infectious disease and the preparedness and response aspects of the emergencies. Ultimately, you will be asked to advise a senior leader in these situations by proposing a suite of solutions to certain problems and briefing both the pros and cons of each solution to guide the leader in making the final decision.