Methodological Lessons Learned

CASPER trainings are successful in increasing disaster epidemiology skills. CASPER can be used by Public Health Emergency Preparedness program awardees to help build and sustain preparedness and response capabilities.CASPER is an effective and frequently employed tool for public health emergency managementThe use of CASPER as a public health emergency preparedness and response tool can increase state and local public health emergency response capacities.Although originally designed for disaster response, CASPERs can be used throughout the disaster life cycle and in nondisaster situations, and they can can contribute to informing jurisdictional risk assessmentsSome areas have been indentified for future improvementThe majority (80.0%) of CASPERs did not document implementation of recommendations based on CASPER findings.Disseminating CASPER findings and sharing lessons learned with the wider public health community are important to highlight common problems and opportunities for improvement that exist across many communities

The authors plan to integrate additional factors to better simulate the outcomes of evacuation-related decisions. Such as varying types of evacuation agents, including vehicles, bicycles and pedestrians.The authors will also study how psychological characteristics affect drivers’ behaviors, especially how such affects might be integrated into an agent’s decision model in which evacuation rates can be estimated with varying proportions of agents failing to follow an evacuation plan.

It also presents a series of first test findings but not as yet the results of improvements initiated by using the instrument.The indicators were considered relevant and important but too many in number. Therefore, a possibility to use the instrument in three separate parts, relating respectively to the period before, during and after a crisis, should be offered.

- the findings are based on one single fictional coffeemaker crisis, with only one type of crisis examined,- the study only examines the effects of crisis management during the crisis response phase- the participants included in this study cannot be considered as random- the effect sizes for different factors revealed in this study are fairly small

It is necessary to discuss the generalizability and validity of the findings internationally.

good approach in design and developmentnevertheless ongoing work, should be tracked further (own opinion, not stated in the paper)

Clear comparision of survey variables.Facilitating workplace communication appeared important for both groups of workers. (severely damaged and less damaged workers)

experiment included only one public, college students, in a series of university crisis situations. Additional experiments are needed with different publics and different crisis situations that highly involve these publics, so as to test whether the causal effects of crisis information form and source hold valid and reliable across different publics.additional research is needed to further segment public types by media consumption habits and level of involvement with the organization in crisisimportant for future research to also explore the synergistic impact of multiple forms and sources of crisis information dissemination.

the studied subjects were real disaster management personnel on duty, which limited the time to survey and interview them after the exerciselarge number of stakeholders usually involved in multi-agency disaster management environments makes it extremely difficult to reach a consensus on the measure