Preserving lessons learned in disease outbreaks and other emergency responses.

Background: Public health departments often miss the opportunity to both learn from outbreaks and disasters and share any 'lessons learned' with other public health partners. These missed opportunities inhibit the public health system's ability to improve, change and adapt in an organized way.

Methods: In 2003, Western Pennsylvania experienced the largest documented hepatitis A outbreak in US history. The authors documented the key facets of both the outbreak and the response, and in the process developed improved methods for capturing the historical record in an efficient and comprehensive fashion. This process incorporates key aspects of oral history, along with typical public health parameters such as epidemic curves and environmental risk factors, and allows for creation of unique tools for documentation and sharing with diverse audiences.

Conclusions: Learning from experience is an essential part of reducing mistakes, improving public health response, and the methods described herein show one way that 'lessons learned' can become a valuable teaching/training tool for students and practitioners.