About the 2025 Conference Theme
Recovery is an important but often overlooked phase in the disaster life cycle that begins immediately after the threat to human life has subsided. We, as a community, must take time to be intentional about recovery to learn from our experiences and improve preparedness and response capacity into the future. This is particularly timely in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and amidst the cascading challenges of environmental disasters.
Now is our opportunity to ask questions and develop answers as we consider roles and responsibilities, and resources needed to undertake the crucial step of recovery. What does recovery look like for individuals, systems, organizations, and the community? How do we ensure equity in all aspects of recovery? How do we strengthen relationships across sectors to work together in recovery? How do we ensure our workforce is part of a recovery plan? How does recovery impact how we prepare for and respond to the next event?
The theme of the 2025 Preparedness Summit, “Pathways to Recovery in the Aftermath of Disasters,” will provide an opportunity to explore these and many other questions as we share experiences, learn, and collaborate across the public health, emergency management, and healthcare sectors. By taking the time to consider and incorporate into our work the many facets of recovery, we can truly build resilience with our communities in the short- and long-term.
About the Preparedness Summit
The Preparedness Summit is the first and longest-running national conference on public health preparedness. Since its beginning in 2007, the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) has taken a leadership role in convening a wide array of partners to participate in the Summit; presenting new research findings, sharing tools and resources, and providing a variety of opportunities for attendees to learn how to implement model practices that enhance the nation’s capabilities to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters and other emergencies.
Over the last decade, the nature of threats to our national health security have changed significantly. As professionals in the public health preparedness space, we can expect these threats to continue to evolve. It is imperative that we adapt our public health practices to meet the demands of an ever-evolving threat environment. But how do we, as preparedness leaders, help our communities become more prepared to respond to and recover from uncharted catastrophic events? We can start doing so by discovering new and creative solutions to address events like pandemic diseases, the opioid crisis, active shooter emergencies, and cybersecurity threats.
Each year, the Preparedness Summit will feature experts from the healthcare and emergency management fields in addition to public health preparedness professionals to address the gaps between these life-saving industries in an effort to work more collaboratively and efficiently in the face of emerging threats. Reaching across these sectors will leverage diversity of thought and advance the capacity of our communities to respond to and recover from emergency events. We hope that this conference will provide an opportunity to build stronger partnerships and encourage us to find innovative solutions with our allies.
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