District of Columbia Healthcare Facilities Emergency Care Coalition

The Issue in Brief

The DC Healthcare Facilities Emergency Care Coalition, funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, was designed to significantly improve the state of emergency preparedness in health care facilities in the District of Columbia, and to create a model for emergency preparedness that can be utilized by other large cities or regions of care across the nation.

Its goal is to provide a comprehensive, uniform, and consistent framework and infrastructure for emergency preparedness across the full continuum of patient care. Devised to address the inconsistencies, shortcomings, fragmentations, and gaps that are present in current District hospital and healthcare facility emergency preparedness and response capabilities, the Coalition will achieve results that will have a lasting impact on the District’s medical preparedness and improve its response to a catastrophic event.

Best practices and models for replicability across the nation should also develop from this process.