Australian Health Management Plan for Pandemic Influenza

D. Looking to the future

Considerable advances have been made to prepare Australia for an influenza pandemic. Within the health sector, achievements include:

• development of a comprehensive national strategic framework for the health sector response, which is underpinned by jurisdictional plans and operational procedures
• coordination of the response at national and jurisdictional level via the AHPC, utilising the NIR within the DoHA as the hub of government information and response
• development of a legislative framework for health protection
• establishment of national infrastructure including:
  • a national stockpile of antiviral medicines, personal protective equipment and other stores that are likely to be needed in a pandemic, including thermal imaging scanners, other medicines and medical equipment
  • a stockpile of H5N1 candidate pandemic vaccine
  • the WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza (WHOCC) at new state-of-the-art facilities at the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory (VIDRL) in Melbourne
• agreements for the manufacture of customised pandemic vaccine
• development of methods and processes to scale up surveillance and monitoring of international situations
• comprehensive communication strategies.

The challenge now is to ensure this level of preparedness can be sustained into the future and used, in the absence of a pandemic, to address other possible health emergencies.

Sustaining our level of preparedness

A number of measures have been put in place to ensure that pandemic planning remains appropriate and in line with scientific advances:

• this plan will be revised every two years
• the technical annexes that accompany this plan will be reviewed every two years by expert groups
• the assumptions upon which this plan is built have been made explicit and expert groups will continually review the assumptions in light of new scientific data—significant developments that may affect our current assumptions will be incorporated into our planning
• Australia works closely with the WHO in a variety of forums and the WHOCC in Melbourne is an integral part of the WHO Global Influenza Surveillance Network (GISN)—if developments occur overseas that might have an impact on planning, the AHPC will be informed via the DoHA and an assessment of need for further action can be taken
• if there are any developments of concern overseas, the CMO can convene the EAG urgently to review the situation and provide advice to the Minister of Health and Ageing as needed.

The following activities will be undertaken to ensure that our level of preparedness is sustained into the future:

• exercising preparedness plans, operations and communication channels
• development of training material for a range of responders.

Using pandemic planning and preparedness to reduce the impact of other major health events

It is also important to consider how to broaden our pandemic response planning beyond influenza to incorporate a wider range of communicable disease threats. The development of a strategic framework for pandemic response, encapsulating aims, goals, operational objectives, actions required and operational tools is a useful structure for responding to any potential communicable disease epidemic threat.

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This information is current for 03 September, 2010
This information was issued on 05 December, 2008