Millions of dollars and countless hours have been put into preparing for a pandemic flu, but contingency planners may have neglected a major problem: Some public health workers may not show up in an emergency. A survey from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health says one in six employees would not report to work during a pandemic flu emergency regardless of its severity.

 

“Employee response is a critical component of preparedness planning, yet it is often overlooked,” says the study’s lead author Daniel Barnett, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Our study is an attempt to understand the underlying factors that determine an employee’s willingness to respond in an emergency.”  

Overall, 16 percent of the workers surveyed said they would not report, regardless of the severity of the outbreak, according to the study published in the journal PLoS One.

The workers who feel they would have the greatest impact are the most willing to go to work. The best hope are public health workers who are both “concerned” about the threat posed by a pandemic and who are “confident” that they could fulfill their response roles and that their roles would have a meaningful impact. These employess are 31 times more likely to go to work in an emergency than those who perceived the threat low and had low levels of confidence.

Workers whose perception of the threat as “low” but who strongly believe in the efficacy of their job are 18 times more likely to say they would respond, compared to those in the low threat and low efficacy group. The online survey questioned 1,835 public health workers in Minnesota, Ohio, and West Virginia from November 2006 to December 2007.

“We found belief in the importance of one’s work was strongly associated with a willingness to report to work in an emergency,” says co-author Ran Balicer, senior lecturer in the Epidemiology Department at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. “Our results could help preparedness planners to identify workforce needs and develop strategies for improving worker response,” adds Balicer, joint editor of the Israeli Ministry of Health Pandemic Preparedness Plan.

The recent numbers are an improvement over a survey conducted by the same research team in 2005. In that survey, more than 40 percent of public health employees said they were unlikely to report to work during a pandemic emergency.