The adaptive response metric: toward an all-hazards tool for planning, decision support, and after-action analytics.

Local health departments are organized, resourced, and operated primarily for routine public health services. For them, responding to emergencies and disasters requires adaptation to meet the demands of an emergency, and they must reallocate or augment resources, adjust work schedules, and, depending on severity and duration of the event, even compromise routine service outputs. These adaptations occur to varying degrees regardless of the type of emergency or disaster.

Developing a measure of local agency adaptation to emergencies: a metric.

Local public health agencies often must respond to health-related emergencies or disasters, while continuing to fulfill all public health functions for which they are funded. This article reports the development and initial pilot test of a method for measuring the nature and degree of a public health agency's response to such an emergency or disaster. How the instrument was developed as well as the initial results from the pilot study of four local public health systems (LPHSs) are presented and discussed.