Health Partners

The Health Preparedness Program (HPP) partners with and helps fund other efforts within Idaho Department of Health and Welfare (IDHW) to better promote public health throughout the state. These partners work directly with HPP in their planning and coordination efforts.

The Idaho Bureau of Laboratories (IBL) participates in exercises that involve specific laboratory functions such as emergency communications, providing advice on sample collection, packaging and shipping, receiving samples, handling evidentiary samples, testing samples, and reporting analytical results. IBL has exercised with district health departments, hospitals, regional HazMat teams, the 101st Civil Support Team, other state public health laboratories in the Laboratory Response Network, EPA, FDA, and CDC. IBL maintains a sentinel laboratory network of 40+ clinical laboratories trained to recognize potential terrorism agents. It exercises this sentinel network several times yearly through live agent proficiency tests design to assess capability to rule-out or refer threat agents and to correctly package and ship them to IBL when necessary.

The Office of Epidemiology and Food Protection (OEFP), located in IDHW/Division of Health, carries out epidemiology activities in the Idaho public health system in coordination with the seven District Health Departments (DHDs). These activities include disease investigation, data collection, data analysis, and outbreak investigation and control. The OEFP also works with other local, state, and federal agencies to obtain and provide public health information and resources to assist in effectively carrying out epidemiology activities in Idaho. The list of reportable diseases in Idaho can be accessed from the Epidemiology website: www.epi.idaho.gov and can be reported to your local public health district.

The Idaho EMS State Communications Center (StateComm) is an emergency and non emergency incident management resource as well as dispatch center for many agencies throughout Idaho. Services that StateComm provide include but are not limited to EMS dispatch, public health threat notification to district and state public health departments, coordinating medical control from EMS unit to hospital, hazardous material response coordination, Critical Incident Stress Management, Idaho Transportation Department dispatch (road closures, highway incidents, Dynamic Message Sign activation, Condition Acquisition Reporting System (CARS) 511 data entry), aircraft tracking and flight following and notifications of weather situations that could pose a threat. StateComm staff are certified Emergency Medical Dispatchers providing pre arrival instructions to patients prior to the arrival of EMS. All calls for these services come into StateComm and are handled by EMS staff. StateComm operates 37 remote mountaintop transmitter sites connected by microwave links and is staffed 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.