Report 2018-116 Recommendation 3 Responses

Report 2018-116: San Diego's Hepatitis A Outbreak: By Acting More Quickly, the County and City of San Diego Might Have Reduced the Spread of the Disease (Release Date: December 2018)

Recommendation #3 To: San Diego, County of

To prevent delays when responding to future communicable disease outbreaks, the county should ensure that in the event of an outbreak, its response plans include the following critical elements: specific and achievable objectives, time frames by which it expects to achieve these objectives, and the resources necessary to achieve its objectives within the planned time frames. Furthermore, the county should update its emergency operations plan and other planning documents to reflect these changes by April 30, 2019.

6-Month Agency Response

The Communicable Disease Outbreak Response Plan Framework was created to guide the development of County of San Diego response plans to address outbreaks of communicable disease requiring the activation of the Incident Command System. The purpose of this framework is to provide a flexible, comprehensive guide to response planning response for outbreaks of communicable disease that may vary considerably in the populations at risk, method of transmission, morbidity and mortality rates, and other important factors. It provides questions and examples to encourage the development of comprehensive S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic, and Time-sensitive) objectives and the identification of the resources necessary to achieve them.

The attached Hepatitis A Outbreak Response Plan has been revised to include information about the use of the Incident Command System to guide outbreak response activities, as well as how S.M.A.R.T. objectives are used to plan day-to-day operations during an outbreak response (p. 30). It also has been updated to clarify barriers and limitations to developing numerical targets for outbreak response objectives (p. 14).

California State Auditor's Assessment of 6-Month Status: Fully Implemented

All Recommendations in 2018-116

Agency responses received are posted verbatim.