Description
This second training builds on the first course’s internal ICS foundation and focuses on how public health operates within the wider emergency management system. It prepares learners to coordinate with external partners, understand public health’s lead and support roles, use ICS-based structures across DOC and EOC environments, and apply planning, complexity, and preparedness concepts to real public health incident operations.

PURPOSE
The purpose of this training is to help public health personnel translate ICS/NIMS knowledge into real-world public health practice within the larger response environment. It emphasizes how health departments coordinate with emergency management, ESF partners, healthcare and community organizations, and other agencies while preserving public health’s own authorities, responsibilities, and mission.

Learning Objectives
By the end of this training, participants should be able to:

1. Explain how public health fits within the wider emergency management and multiagency response system.
2. Describe how all-hazards thinking, ESF coordination, and whole-community partnerships shape public health emergency operations.
3. Apply core ICS concepts in public health settings, including use of DOCs, EOCs, operational periods, incident action planning, and complexity-based expansion.
4. Distinguish when public health is leading, supporting, or coordinating during incidents and how that role changes across incident phases and structures.
5. Connect workforce readiness and personal preparedness to continuity, deployability, and sustained public health response operations.