This year’s theme was “Preparing for the Pandemic Influenza Outbreak through Community Partnership.”
The main focus of last year’s summit was to discuss the need for FSM to review and update the pandemic influenza preparedness plans developed in 2004.
Due to issuance of new planning guidelines by agencies and organizations such as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which fund the cooperative agreement grants that the FSM receives, there is a need to revise the plan.
During the summit in 2008, all the four FSM states were tasked to conduct reviews and make revisions on their plans to address three main components: continuing operation plans, community containment, and mass vaccination.
Each entity, including the FSM National Department of Health and Social Affairs, was tasked to update their plans to address these areas.
Each entity was expected to provide an update on their plans during this year’s summit.
The revised plan for the FSM was submitted to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Based on its evaluation, there are areas with major gaps that need to be improved in the planning document, especially in the continuing operation component.
Other component such as mass vaccination did receive acceptable ratings, but FSM still needs to continually review and revise the plan to be in line with new guidelines.
For this year’s summit, new components have been added and the FSM and the states need to develop and incorporate them into their pandemic influenza plans.
These additional components are: surveillance and laboratory capacity, communication interoperability, port of entry, and distribution of medical countermeasures.
