Preparedness 18
Preparedness 18 :
“Part of the problem is the lack of a common definition of “preparedness”. When PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Health Research Institute (HRI) asked industry leaders to define preparedness, they agreed on only two things: (1) there is currently no universally accepted definition of preparedness; and (2) we must continue getting “better prepared”. Without a definition, it’s hard to develop benchmarks. Noted Irwin Redlener, M.D., associate dean and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, ‘Whatever you think about being prepared as an individual or family, extrapolate that to a hospital CEO. They have no idea of what the end point is because there are no satisfactory benchmarks to establish what we mean by ‘prepared”. (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2007, p. 5)
