Mass Vaccination Proposal

After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) required all local public health departments to create a mass vaccination plan in the event of an infectious disease outbreak such as smallpox (Aaby, et al. 2006). Even though the Montgomery County Public Health Services (PHS) of Maryland had experience with handling infectious diseases such as flu outbreaks and had previously executed mass-dispensing of vaccine during the October 2001 Anthrax attacks, those events were considered small scale in comparison to the CDC’s requirement (Aaby, et al. 2006). In order to improve its planning process the Montgomery County PHS partnered with the University of Maryland and Collage Park. The Montgomery
County PHS partnership developed three planning models; discrete-event simulation model, capacity-planning and queuing system models (Aaby, et al. 2006). After several simulations and a full scale exercise Montgomery County PHS partnership assessed the results and narrowed its scope to capacity planning and queuing system models in order to better address Public Health Official concerns (Aaby, et al. 2006). By narrowing the scope and with the additional feedback the Montgomery County PHS partnership were able to create software which generates a spreadsheet-based capacity-planning and queuing model with the ability to be customized by clinic layout (Aaby, et al. 2006), providing Public Health officials the needed flexibility required. This spreadsheet-based capacity-planning and queuing model allows for a quick estimation on capacity, and assist in the identification of congestion points during an event versus waiting for data from a simulation that takes up valuable time.