Public Health Prepared, a program of the Michigan Center for Infectious Disease Threats and Pandemic Preparedness at the University of Michigan, and the Wayne State University School of Medicine’s Center for Emerging and Infectious Diseases have partnered to offer a free webinar series titled Preparedness Roundtable.

The four-part series will focus on a range of issues concerning the role of public health in responding to infectious disease outbreaks and disasters. Topics such as disasters and climate change, public health disparities, and emerging and seasonal disease threats will be covered. The first session, planned for Sept. 8, from noon to 1 p.m.. will focus on the challenges of vaccine hesitancy and approaches to overcoming this issue in interpersonal and community settings. The session will feature presenters from Wayne State University, Michigan State University and the University of Michigan.

“The Preparedness Roundtable was developed with the idea of collaborating across sectors, specifically bringing together practitioners and researchers in public health and medicine to face the ongoing challenges of communicable diseases ” said Laura Power, M.D., M.P.H., associate professor of Epidemiology at the University of Michigan and director of Public Health Prepared. “This partnership is one step toward improving our capacity to respond to emerging infectious disease threats.”

Both the WSU Center for Emerging and Infectious Diseases and UM Public Health Prepared were created in the last year in response to the needs made evident by COVID-19. The Preparedness Roundtable series aims to provide a space for cross-sector education and engagement for those in public health, health care and other related fields in order to build capacity and foster greater collaboration among those working in emergency preparedness.

“There are important lessons from the pandemic that we need to act on in preparation for the next pandemic, and we are excited to be working with our colleagues at the University of Michigan to help bring a broad perspective to the challenges of public health preparedness,”  said Marc Zervos, M.D., director of the WSU Center for Emerging and Infectious Diseases and associate dean for Global Health at the Wayne State University School of Medicine.

Register for the Sept. 8 session, “From Vaccine Hesitancy to Vaccine Confidence,” at https://phprepared.catalog.instructure.com/courses/prvhw0922noce

For more information about the series, visit: https://www.publichealthprepared.org/collaborations/