Texas Health Institute: Culturally Diverse Communities and Emergency Preparedness

The Texas Health Institute, with funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health, has a toolkit on advancing the preparedness of diverse communities for public health emergencies.  The toolkit

1. Highlights the importance of taking specific actions that recognize and integrate distinct, individual and especially community-focused race, ethnic, culture, and language priorities and perspectives into mainstream emergency preparedness, response and recovery actions

2. “Grounds” efforts to reduce disparities with state-of-the-art leading practices and models, experience, expertise and research that can provide practical guidance for programs and services as well as communities, and

3. Provides for local, state and federal officials information and a specific set of initiative areas that can assist in informing decisions around programs and policies that work to assure effective outreach and engagement of diverse communities in critical emergency strategies.

The toolkit uses eight guiding principles:

Link to Original Source

Link to Original Source

The toolkit is based on a National Consensus Statement on Integrating Racially and Ethnically Diverse Communities into Public Health Emergency Preparedness:

Link to Original Source

Additional background information and resources are available from the Texas Health Institute website.