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welcome is thank you for joining public interface approaches during an F ad outbreak before we begin please ensure you have opened the WebEx chat panel using the Associated icon located at the bottom of your screen note that all audio connections are muted at this time there will be QA today to ask a question select all panelists from the drop-down menu in the chat panel and enter your question in the message box provided alternatively you may dial pound two on your telephone keypad to enter the verbal question queue if you require technical assistance please send a chat to the event producer and with that I'll turn the conference over to Liz Fernandez Liz good morning everyone I'm Liz Fernandez with the professional development services branch and I'd also like to welcome you to today's webinar we have three speakers for today our first speaker is Mike Sethi ins life has worked in public affairs at USDA for nearly four years prior to that he spent nine years working for DoD he's an Army veterinarian and graduate of the University of Louisville our second speaker is Dana Wagner she's been with the she's with the Kansas Department of Agriculture since October 2014 in her role as compliance education coordinator she assists the agency with education and outreach opportunities internal and external to the agency having been involved with five fully functional state level exercises and two tabletop exercises in Kansas Dana serves as phonebank coordinator and as part of the joint information center JTA in close consultation with their usda aphis veterinary services national preparedness and Incident coordinator EMRs bass specialists have worked closely over the years to develop a database system meeting the needs of kansas agriculture during an animal emergency allowing phonebank members to secure much-needed increment from the public and our third speaker is Lisa key roads Lisa manages the animal health branch emergency preparedness and response sections and has worked for the California Department of Food and Agriculture for over 20 years we have spent the majority of her career with the state and emergency preparedness and response over the last year and a half she fulfilled many deployments to the California Newcastle disease incident command post serving as planning section chief and industry risk assessment and mitigation section chief chief where she worked on response strategy and oversaw case managers working with non-infected impacted producers in Southern California Mesa represents California on the USDA veterinary services national training and exercise plan workgroup where she works with colleagues around the nation to further animal health responders preparedness and with that I'm going to turn the webinar over to Mike say good morning everyone my name is Mike stepping on one issue a quick clarification here I'm the Army veteran not an army veterinarian so just want to make sure everyone understands that so I work in public affairs at USDA APHIS I want to thank you all for taking the time to join us on the webinar today and I've been asked to provide some general guidelines regarding public response in the event of a disease outbreak so I will move on to the next slide and we will get started all right risk of these nine different bullets here jumper the first one limit the number of messages you can only retain so much information so there's no reason go overboard think about the critical information your audience will need create key messages support those messages with fact if a foreign animal diseases outbreak occurs put together a team identify your key messages and stick with them then all your messages based on equality questions who is your audience you who are we speaking to what do they need to know about the issue what's really important to them and what we want them to know regardless of the questions that are going to be asked of us I'm use your International with the media as an opportunity to get your get across your messages stick with the fact and answer questions with a quick little key messages across ideally put together three key messages with three supporting facts for each message it should be simple enough for a six script six Raider understand so no reason to get too scientific with these the second bullet be brief concise is the way to go this is pretty easy for someone like news generally pretty quiet by nature but it's difficult for people who are naturally talkative and really extraverted there's there's no reason to give more information that a reporter needs to know just just state and size if there's a moment of silence when interacting the reporter just stick with that moment of silence and let it play out it may be uncomfortable it's not really part of our regular human nature but don't volunteer information during that moment of silence number three use appropriate visuals simple visual can help your audience better understand your message something like a graph that's easy to interpret example that is you see Vice President Pence consistently displaying the slow spread visual visual is simple it's easy to follow and he repeatedly displays it and we all will understand the message he's trying to convey there be conscious of your nonverbal gestures body language often overrides verbal communication but one thing I'd like to point out is its kind of nodding your head up and down with someone's asking question we really want to avoid that it's common it's human nature you're just acknowledging that someone is asking you something but if you're asking a potentially damaging question it's not a good visual to be knotted up and down so just kind of keep in mind or cognizant of that nonverbal gestures provided a decent amount of your message content nonverbal gestures Arno's intensely and easily negative interpretive for example you can usually tell someone is really upset with you you know by their body language with words you know they're gonna tell you I'm pretty upset with you use people with their arms cause facial expressions frowning so body language is very important and be careful the kind of nonverbal signals yours you are giving and it spins on the situation so for example smiling in a high-stress situation if you're smiling your period not caring in a low stress situation for smiling you appear to be friendly so a lot of it depends on the situation that you're in just couple of things with your eyes you and maintain positive eye contacts don't you do not want to blink too much turn your eyes up and down from side to side with your hands some positive things to do provide a full partial view of the open hand palm use small gestures when talking you don't want to wave your hands around too much or make distraction make distracting motions by playing with their coins in the pot next bullet gained your audience's trust this is a big one as a communicator do not speculate about the future you know only with what you know do not lie make sure that the information said you're giving it accurate in crisis situations if the better the bad news is a trusted source there's a much more calming effect and it's if it's coming from an untrusted source this is why your credibility is so important you want people to trust you that will reduce panic in crisis trust and credibility are difficult to obtain and once they want their laws there it's almost impossible to regain so again tell the truth and stick with facts next bullet is convince your audience that you care genuine empathy goes a long way in stressful situations or crises whether or not your eyes believes you to be tearing out of that caring or empathetic has a huge impact on whether they trust you it's caring empathy openness and honesty or the approach is needed for high-stress situations you want to speak clearly and with compassion technology tragedy and the illness and just really Express that empathy allowing yourself credible sources your agency may be unknown to your audience and you will have to build trust immediately it will know your reputation whether other credible sources back you up each crisis situation could influence the outcome of future crisis is an example the credit samples of credible sources include respected local citizens senior government officials stakeholders who benefit from your work and possibly other federal agencies avoid negative language if you don't want to use words such as no nothing not never done can't you want to phrase things positively instead of saying something like we can't do that say something like we're exploring other methods or ways for doing that a preparing plan most concerns in a crisis can be anticipated in prepare for in advance that's where your key messages are going to come into play if you have time do some quick background research on the reporter who will be asking you questions and practice what you're going to say if you have time record yourself watch to see what you're doing right wrong it they'll feel awkward but it's a great way to be prepared so that is pretty much all that I have I hope this information has been helpful feel free to contact me if you do anything in future and I will turn it over beta good morning I'm Dana Lavery with the Kansas Department of Agriculture and they did it everybody that has logged in today we appreciated it I'm going to talk a little bit this morning about our emergency exercise phone banks and the bratty little history on our phone banks the Department of Agriculture has been researching and testing effective and efficient ways communities are phone calls from the public during during an actual event and we have practices over the last five years in the state of Kansas and there have been many changes from starting out with this is not going to work we're going to shut it down after the first day - oK we've got things under control now what can we do to really find the most robust opportunity to secure information from collars from the state of Kansas for our 2019 event we have 18 Department of eggs staff numbers on the phone bank and at that time we were split between two locations our headquarters in Manhattan and then off-site either home-based folks were coming in or from our laboratory the truth is in Topeka and having the capability to utilize opossite really enables folks to join some bank some other program areas the king-8 phone banking system members from all kinds of programs in division and it may not seem right at first but it really does help that so many members may not have a begger cultural background and this is really a positive and this keeps the phone bank team members really sticking to the facts they only disseminate factual information and there is not a lot of opportunity to incorporate personal stories and experiences we do have fkd a IT member dedicated to the gist and for technical assistance to the phone and I would suggest anyone that thinking about any phone banks set up and really testing it to make sure you have that IT support we also have an SME from k-state research and extension on our phone they into those technical questions because so many of our animal agriculture experts are part of our IMT and bringing somebody in from the outside that is able to answer those questions using our internal communication needs it's really essential that way it frees up our staff to do their job they get we have a great information person at our resource one thing that it's super important for internal the phone bank coordinator the jiff manager and the CIO really have to have a great working relationship they depend on each other they look to each other information is coming in from the phone bank new fa Q's are being determined and written as we see the need and as Mike said a little bit earlier you know epic yous need to be factual to sync and easy to comprehend not only for phone bank members that are talking with the public but for the public to understand the message that's going out but really really is important on that faction succinct and easy to comprehend another thing that we have found out that a phone bank members will be taking information from the public and it really is high priority for great information so we can assist other sections of the incident management team Department of Ag has looked at a couple different ways to utilize our phone banks and software with it we utilize a kDa alert systems for notification of our phone bank for activation we utilize ring central for incoming calls we use slack as internal communications because we're able to add people from the outside whether it's from research and extension maybe stakeholders groups that have an expert etc so classes our internal communications opportunity there and we use Amer's we'll talk about that just a little bit and for our fa Q's we've used Google Docs and Microsoft onedrive and one thing I would suggest that any suggestions any software your team is thinking about using it has to be easy and allow for just-in-time training for immerse we have been blessed but our USDA contact is working with our state because we really wanted to expand out on Kansas and what our phone banks to do so they've made some tweaks that Arkansas statistics to capture census information animal health they as a call we map locations and if it's not already self populating we utilize Bing Maps for coordinates to make sure this information is up-to-date and is accurate as possible there can have health in the case of control areas and other zones and we have found out during our exercises that there's also other information where our collars collars being important and that may include wildlife movement violations etc so we've expanded out the Kansas version specific to our needs we found that our phone bank really adds value to our exercise and being the far twine as I stated earlier we reached out to the Emer staff to be able to tweak that system to make our phone bank is valuable as possible to our state for an actual animal emergency beamers is the online application used for most animal emergency responses it's web-based our users are authorized but we make sure that our team goes into a Mars quarterly so we keep our credentials up-to-date because you never know what an actual emergency is going to happen and we need to make sure that we can get on and get moving right away so as long as folks have internet access and a Microsoft platform we'll be able to hit the ground running in 2018 was the first year we tested it here's a specific gamers information in our functional exercise we made some tweaks and we used it again in 2018 and tip things to the next level first capability with the evolution of emerge for Arkansas system the initial contact reps record is really where we start once been working with the names addresses information on animals etc this software's been tweaked to have a sync wizard to walk our phone bank members through the system as easily as possible the information is quick and easily captured by our staff and the ICR is been immediately available to other MIT sections for action as necessary from the very initial screen once the phone bank team starts taking calls with information if they state that their animals have clinical signs that are consistent with the disease look like a yes box and that information immediately goes to our Operations Center and they have a person on their internet monitors that information consistently the first time that we have this go in 2018 I was super nervous on how it was going to work and my office is located on the first floor of our building and operations was on the third floor of our building so needless to say I took two flights of stairs fairly quickly just to make sure it worked and I got up there's like I'll bet you trying to find it this worked and it did of just knowing that first time that it worked like it was supposed to this really exciting for the coordinator and for the whole team knowing that it worked the way it was we also added additions for our permitting section and if a caller comes in and they need to move animals or animal commodities or able to enter additional information into a permitting section that the wizard is led us to and that again goes immediately to the permitting unit and they'
e able to continue with their job and there's also in other sections and that is monitored by the operations section for action that's necessary I want to kind of dive off in the direction right now because with Kovan 19 reality of hit Kansas on April 1st the Kansas a DLC called upon Katie a phone bank to assist the state of Kansas in the Department of Labor with their incoming calls reportedly the Department of Labor for our state was receiving 50 to 100 thousand calls a day kDa was called upon by our governor and other acting the secretaries from the other agencies because we had experienced from our exercise to be able to come to the call of our state at that time our phone bank coordinators with myself and the co-coordinator began discussions immediately on what the plan was going to be utilizing kDa alert on April 1st we send a message to text alert our team and ask them to begin looking for notices and eat logging to their email for additional information with discussions between the governor's office and cabinet secretaries it became obvious the Department of Ag has something that our state could offer during the kovin 19 pandemic students suspended operations our governor actually closed down the state of Kansas except for those essential personnel from March 23rd through April 3rd we had kDa staff and regulatory positions that we're going to be able to assist with the phonebank program and division managers were asked to review their staffing needs the next 30 days our deputy secretary provided me as coordinator with those names that I was in constant contact with our IT staff asking them their opinions on things being able to get the right information to our the phone bank coordinators getting headset through our folks with that but we also had to realize that the Department of Labor was going to be taking the lead on the effort so they have decided to use Amazon Connect that our funding and our IT team communicates with their teams on specifics and they've decided to use Microsoft teams for their internal communication on April 2nd we can a second follow-up kDa a work which notified our staff as we be back staffing on April 6th as best as we could but that all kDa staff which look for an email for me for possible stonebanks activation the KA phone bank grew from 20 to 60 volunteers virtually overnight all of our volunteers from the agency are working from their homes with the shutdown from that governor coming earlier our team had taken their computers home so that was a great thing they already had in place we in my storm site to gather information from our team members on days of the week and the times that they were available and our coordinator began developing a staffing schedule our IT team o ordered our headsets and April 7 the co coordinator and I arranged for headset distribution at our headquarters in Manhattan and again in speaka where some of our self reside we basically had the headsets in the trunk of our cars a name the folks that needed to pick them up there we stood six feet from each other they picked them up and so with kind of interesting on distribution we get names the things in the note that within the states were able to nail those out they've been in daily contact with the governor's office who is assisting the partner labor coordinating efforts for the phone bank the coordinator and I communicate constantly on our needs and prior to going live we really spend a lot of time making sure our team has a not only the tools that they have they're being able to let them know that we really believed in them and that they could help out with the Department of Labor even though they had not been original phonebank members we believed in our staff that we could step up to the plate April 7th Department of Labor provided our team with fa Q's to read and begins preparation and on April 8th there was a webinar by the Department of Labor on Amazon connect Microsoft teams and the unemployment benefits for Kansas and then it got real last Thursday 8:00 a.m. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Commerce became the front line for the phone base for the Kansas Department of Labor Department of Agriculture committed 64 staff to the mission to assist in the Department of Commerce design tune that could be 10 and within the department of agriculture we have 14 programs for divisions that are helping out all stonebanks first day our team handled over 3,000 calls and over 4,300 Kansa were served compared to thirteen-hundred them on that Monday the Department of Labor's are making technical improvements continuously just due to the cone volume and additional Department of Labor of toys have been passed with technical assistance and unemployment issues specific for the next week which now it's this week and things are definitely evolving and improving the best they can Oh lessons learned if you really need to have a strong relationship between the phone bank coordinator and the co coordinator because one person cannot do it all it's mentally and physically exhausting to have Bethany on your team that you're responsible for and so having somebody's independence is essential expectations with some Bank volunteers need to be made clear it was I we expected them to check their email our leaf before we went live to make sure that there weren't the updates we expected them to read the FAQ and be prepared for their first shift on it we expected them to communicate within the team's internal communications as stated earlier the state communications are preferred going back and forth even with your internal teams bulleted items highlighted on deadlines during an actual event no one has time to compose an email novel nor does anyone want to read it exile anxiety and others are high partment of Agriculture had new software a new subject matters and a lot of questions if we could do this and I guarantee we're doing it consistently the coordinator is essential knowing that our team had somebody for the last five years that was able to work with the phone banks those that were brand new had a confidence level and trust level that we can do that was we've been there we had a plan and we've executed the plan this is we had have it prepared for our agency Kea utilizing strength training and as coordinator I'm activator max miners or pretty much get things done let's go let's get it done the co-coordinator she's got a lot of the opposite drinks that I do and we complement each other perfectly couldn't ask for anything better from the team that we have the coordinator that I have so when you're thinking about activating a phone bank so really bracing one up make sure that you've got you will specifically assigned so people work really well together we often talk about in Kansas and Department of Agriculture the KT a way well this is a look at about half of the KD a phone bank team and this is what we look like a bunch of us on there working from home the kids in the background sets in the background headsets etc so we're activating our team we solo the plan it works great and for those that will none of us know anything about these with unemployment issues and those that we do know are straight to the fact and so it keeps us on tab doing what we're asked on this day just on behalf of the state of Kansas I couldn't be more proud of our team so to stepped up the way we have in the last couple of weeks having the exercise to fall back on this would have helped us along the way from our merger to manage the team they prepared us for what we need for an actual event just that they sell let you take it over thank you it's Lisa from the Department of Food and Agriculture I I'm happy to be here today I'm going to spend some time talking about how we interface with the public during si D response I'm going to go through many of the items that you see on the screen in a little bit more detail one of the things that I wanted to touch on on this slide is really about vendor interface a lot of what I will share has to you know came out of our recent vnz response but it we've done many animal disease responses over the years in California and so much of what I have to say is you know valuable during you know all of those other responses as well one of the things about vendors that it's a lesson that comes up over and over again is when we hire outside contractors for their personnel help or even their equipment as having clear direction for vendors is important they are a member of the public they do not understand animal disease outbreaks a response they normally do not understand biosecurity and so we we VND was no different especially when the env was detected in commercial we had vendors that were delivering you know co2 canisters etc and they had other businesses on their route like hospitals and nursing care facilities and restaurants and other places that they were going after they visited our positive commercial policies and so you can imagine the level of biosecurity that we needed to address with them in order to continue to maintain service with that vendor in addition we used outside contractors for including and disinfection teams on those commercial premises and we had to have you know conversations about them not having birds at home and things like that so I just wanted to take the time to just address vendors because sometimes that can be an overlooked item this is an example of an organizational chart that we've used it's more about documenting the functions than it is the actual VND organization chart the Vav organizational chart was too large and would not fit on one page and so I distilled it down to the essential functions I'm sorry if you responded to Randi and your function isn't listed here we we believe all functions are valuable but I just wanted it to fit on one page and just be a quick snapshot there isn't a right or wrong way to organize we try to have uniform follow function and make sure that we're organizing in a way that seems like we can reduce duplication of efforts adequate leadership and accountability during the response and so one of the one of the things I'm going to do during my talk today is I'll refer back to the organizational structure so that you could be an example of how we have organized in the past to address specific situations related to public inquiry or pub you know public interface the two examples of I guess I'll call it a diversion from your traditional ICS training is you know you'll see here we have an industry risk mitigation session early on during a B and D we wanted to make sure that we had dedicated personnel working with uninfected industry producers and so that section was not located in an Operations section where they were dealing mostly with backyard infected premises we separated them out you know the uninfected commercial producers so that we could really focus that effort on risk mitigation and have very clean biologically clean employees deal with our producers and not risk any contamination this section was located at a different part of the building from the other operation section personnel and I'd like to say that we tried our best to create you know clean and dirty lines so that we were sending only clean personnel to those commercial premises we also added an intelligence section and that really had to do with enforcement coordination with law enforcement and really just and an extra level when the public wasn't as cooperative in allowing us to get on into our jobs we needed to have like the next one supervisor come in and be a really good communicator and try to gain access that way and the way that we did that were through special investigators they have sort of almost law enforcement type backgrounds they aren't law enforcement for us but they are kind of that kind of Intel that kind of person many of them are ex law enforcement personnel and they actually just took the time to just talk and speak with the individuals and you know we're able you know we we gained some success that way all right so one of the biggest questions I always get is how do we get all the work done and one of the ways that we get all the work done is by hiring temporary temporary staff and one of the best things that we that I think was having the hiring the job announcement the candidate screening that interviews the hiring all of that was done by personnel who were not assigned to the incident command post that we did not have to take the attention away from our incident management team to go through and look for candidates and figure out who's you know who's the best candidate etcetera we ended up hiring just CDFA hired over a hundred I say hitter than thirty one hundred and fifty personnel over the course of the BND response which almost two years and we've actually identified some very very good candidates in fact as a result of vanity response when we have vacancies that are permanent positions of the state we're often able to tap into those candidates to worked so hard for us over the last two years and fill with those vacancies so we actually did have a lot of success with hiring temporary staff there's also challenges with hiring temporary staff and you know one of those is you know temporary staff need accountability they need to have a supervisor who is dedicated to someone to track track track their time and their time off request them when they become sick and all of that so we actually hired a retired annuitant which is you know just a retired state employee who had been a manager before and she actually came in became dedicated supervisor over the temporary staff the temporary staff were assigned throughout the incident command post you know in their ICS sections and they had a lead on their everyday workload in those sections but they they also had this dedicated supervisor for more of their like HR and you know performance appraisal and you know accountability purposes and so that was another kind of smart move that we made that really reduce the stress on all of the rotating personnel in and out of the incident because the you know personnel do not get a consistent supervisor when you're rotating personnel in and out and so having a dedicated supervisor boots on the grip was really helpful early on we realized especially with the duration of our event you know going to years people get sick people need days off so we needed a way to figure out how can somebody call out sick and let us know they're not going to be on their team that day and you know and allow us some time in the morning to rearrange the teams and send out you know who we have on deck so we ended up coming up with you know almost like a hotline or a call line it was just an answering machine where a temporary staff person could call in and leave a message saying hey I'm going to be out today and then the dedicated supervisor can log in early in the morning grab those messages and then go to whatever section or team and explain to that team leader that their personnel was going to be out that day so that's sort of how we handled all of the you know the rotating staff typically do not get sick and take time off during the rotations because we're permanent staff and were there for a temporary time but the the temporary staff who were hired locally are there the whole two years they don't actually time off and so we did end up later on an incident going from seven day work weeks to six day work weeks for local staff just to allow them to have a rotating day off throughout the week and not burn people out one of the focuses that we had to do was on-the-job training we had to have some way to orient in trained personnel we needed to teach public messaging skills through our field responders we do train them that you know on the back of their badges when they check into the Instagram post everybody gets a badge on the back of the badge is the public information officer telephone number and they are directed not to talk to the public but they also are a public interface entity and when you're out in the field you are going to interface with public and we really needed to teach public messaging skills a lot of times the conversations they're having with individuals are not you know they're difficult conversations sometimes and so the
e was we had some we had some personnel from BS early on in the public information area who helped us create mock interviews and record those interviews and we were able to use those video recordings of mock interviews to help teach those public messaging skills to our temporary staff and that worked really so in case you're wondering this is where we this is where we decided to organize our supervisor for the temporary hires so in talking about public interfacing the first thing that comes to mind for me is the public information officer right so the public information officer always works at the direction of the agency public affairs leadership we heard from Michael earlier he finished shared the you know the ASIS version of you know the vs public affairs perspective and then you know the public information officer on the incident management team is basically working at the direction of the agency public affairs leadership and they are communicating back and forth there's two-way communication there all the time the agency Public Affairs together with the public information officer are leading the public message and outreach strategy for the entire incident they are also overseeing social media one of the social media tactics that we used for public inquiries during v&d is you know our social media manager on the ground is responding only to positive inquiries as you might imagine with as you know we have about and people have estimated three million resin within the quarantine area California and that's a lot of residents who are pretty upset with us and they their inquiries on social media are not always positive and so what our social media manager has decided to do when someone makes a comment you don't respond to every comment but she does respond to positive inquiries and that helps to train the public that if you really want information back from us it needs to be a positive interaction and I think that strategy has worked well the other thing that has worked really well is they are using very short video clips to show best practices especially when Security's practical things that keeps going to do with their own home to help protect their their animals from the disease so socializing that the area quarantine this was a huge effort for us especially initially initially I would say the biggest public information strategy that we had just to get the word out and try to let the public know that there is a problem in Southern California and we're here to help and we have this you know we want you to report in if you're seeing clinical signs in your birds and one of the biggest outreach strategies at the beginning was Church and houses of works worship we have teams every weekend delivering presentations after church services in you know various languages and that actually worked really well in Southern California it did help us to connect with those / you know those people in the community who needed to have the information that there was a dangerous disease in their communities and that really worked well the other thing you know these are some of the other strategies we use to socialize the quarantine you know we put in a newspaper advertisement I know that sounds sort of like it's poor but it is part of our statute and it is a requirement for us to advertise in the newspaper so we did that we worked really closely with the post office to ensure that they were not shipping you know chicks and birds through the mail and they actually have identified all of the zip codes that you know they're out or ship in birds and so the post-office was one of the ways that we could get the word out about what the social you know the quarantine area is on our website at CDF a we had heat maps that you know we're kind of on a timer and they would populate the positives as you know over a time period so that people would see where the hot spots are and were and see if they reside in an area that's you know of high risk we also published the quarantine area map and you know later on we got more sophisticated and we you know we put up a address lookup feature so that if you're unsure if you live in the cording area type in your address that it was telling you yes you're in or no you know you're out of the quarantine area we did lots of speedster outreach we talked about social media Facebook Instagram and then our state veterinarian has lately been posting weekly video updates on Instagram and you know those are really because again the duration of this incident we really needed to ensure that the people of Southern California don't get laxed and don't get complacent that we're really still you know working on getting after this disease and still in their area we want them to remain vigilant dirty so again this is where we locate our public information and website social media and these people are also credible and socializing the quarantine you can see community education personnel and feed store inspection people at some points during the incident this community gee and the community education piece was under our liaison officer again like I said there's no wrong way to organize we we try to let form wrong a follow function and we move items around to make sure that they're getting proper attention so we definitely moved functions around as that was needed dirt on the GIS specialists were critical in helping us draft them and they also help with other elements of technology like the addressing presence ok so what other public interface you know do we do a lot of public interface for us in California is collecting survey information and we need that survey information for you know driving the response you know we need to understand where to draw those quarter controller Airlines you know we need to determine what our control and containment strategies are based on where the susceptible populations are we use the population density for helping to understand how much diagnostic surveillance to do in certain areas we capture everything in Amer's just like kDa we are a very immersive e state we do run all of our emergency for an animal disease response is using a mer and we used it extensively for B and E we also do what we call aerial surveillance and you know we spend some time using Google map and trying to figure out if we can identify our spot areas of highest risk again like I said you know with three million residences in your quarantine area and this being will you know mostly a backyard response it became very important for us to understand you know where the risk areas were and so that was one of the ways that was you identify that and then there also special circumstances right you know we had lots of lost lands there's other you know there's different species you know zoos you know things like that so so one of the first people that go out and get public interface are our backyard disease surveillance personnel and they are they usually have a standard set of questions like a survey that they are filling out sometimes if that I see are the initial contact record that data mentioned and you know on those immers to go tablets they can collect that initial information about every premises that we know about that has suspect susceptible species and that's usually done door-to-door especially during a backyard outbreak that was very necessary for us during this time and so that's how we ended up doing it for B&E also you know public interface while they're collecting diagnostic samples and then managing the sick call hotline and we did not use a phone bank during V and D but we did use a phone bank during a and D back in 2002 and 2003 our plant health division has a phone bank that they used primarily for their you know plant pests in eradication and we were able to tap into their phone bank system during that event we actually used retired veterinarian to it work for us before as our subject matter experts and we had to provide the plant health personnel with like a subject directory and some fa Q's so that they could answer the questions as they were coming in during a and B during B and D we didn't need to do that instead what we did is we hired some temporary employees we were able to hire actually really skilled personnel to handle those vets at call line we had some that were previously vet techs and had some agricultural background and that really helped we also had to hire personnel in you know that we're multi so we had bilingual personnel on that pit call hotline so that they could handle all calls from the public and document what was going on and then some of the other other functions under disease surveillance their tactical epidemiology just understanding what's you know what's going out in a specific region or area and having somebody get their eyes on their ears on actually driving the streets and seeing what the risks are was helpful for us and coordination with the laboratory always so a little more about the spit call hotline these are public calls from individual premises mostly backyards sometimes we would get reports of random mortalities like you know dead bird on the side of the road kind of things those are really difficult because even though you may believe that it's a good thing for us to test those birds it's difficult for us to use that information if you know if you get a positive result when you test a random bird on the side of the road where do you you know what what's the location of the infection you know you don't know who owns that bird or where it has been and so it makes it more difficult so you know us trying to figure out what to do with the public employees of random mortalities all over the place was something that we had to talk about and really understand the consequences of okay we decided to pick these birds up and take them for new crop see or test them in some way we needed to know what to do with those results we also would receive calls in from animal shelters and rehabilitation centers and in some cases you know we needed to work with them to get you know a diagnostic surveillance from some of their birds and get them tested I talked about we we stopped this function with our temporary staff who were highly skilled very they did such a great job and they are still doing that job today and they did use a standardized form once they received an actual truth that call where people report were reporting clinical signs in their birds they actually filled out the form with all the information and the form was designed with the epidemiologist so they would capture the same information for every call and then the staff from the sick hall line would actually hand walk that form over to the epidemiologist where they would finish the calls and prioritize those for operation this is sort of the way that we organize those functions that I just talked about the industry coordination you can see here we have lots of industry coordination one of the things for public inquiry that was the best is we we assign case managers to even the uninfected premises for this commercial and you know larger non-commercial producers we we assign them case managers we also had a weekly call within our state veterinarian led to help keep them informed of the movement in permitting guidelines or encourage them for biosecurity and help them understand new new requirements like biosecurity audits for instance on their premises we did collect biosecurity information on all of the unaffected commercial premises to ensure that their biosecurity was up to standards and we use that information to help inform those mcdermott decisions together with you know we wanted to make sure that all of them have stood up their secure food supply plans and that they were protecting themselves from the disease this is again this was a section and this is how we organize that section backyard disease management these guys actually do a lot of public interface in particular those empresa land identity personnel and we mainly use the appraisal calculator so the appraisal job wasn't as heavy but the indemnity folks these are these really needed to be the sharp communicators these guys needed to have a lot of empathy for the public and they really needed to understand crisis communications and so we actually needed a hand select and hand-picked personnel to be on the indemnity team it wasn't a job for us to just send anyone over there it needed someone who really could communicate and you know v/s brought in a lot of indentity personnel that were really good to help leave these teams but we had some equally good and temporary employees who came in and objective to the plate and really had very good communication skills and then you know those that are performing euthanasia and you know we also instead of C and D forever even back yard we did a fallow period or virus elimination and so the faddle inspections were conducted you know every twenty to thirty days throughout the 122,000 and so we did have personnel out in the field going out and conducting following sessions and that was also another you know public interface opportunities this is how we organize those functions so when a commercial premises became positive we actually activated the that those commercial premises moved from the industry risk mitigation over to the operations section to manage and so commercial disease management we did assign case managers from the OP section to manage those sites they had site managers we did Matt you know mass depopulation and landfill disposal and again you know and I am oversimplifying all of these just you know for the just because we have limited time to talk about these items all right and then so the last slide is you know a lot of people ask me do you need all that personnel over time and the answer is no during the course of the incident these are this chart came directly I have emerged it's organized by personality population date so this mainly captures the rotating personnel not necessarily as many of the temporary staff are located here because they didn't have the immobilization doose's you might imagine that there's this the need for personnel absent flows throughout the incident and you can see as we move way over here into April how little personnel we have April of 2020 versus you know way back at the beginning of the incident when we were at our peak and so the the personality needs to Evan flow we have over time needed to reduce our temporary staffing and so we had to do that in a very organized methodical manner the incident management team really over stopped oversaw that contraction of personnel and their input on who and when you know to actually pull that trigger and that was necessary you know what was considered before we ended up doing any contraction of personnel and I guess the the last message I'll leave here today is really the importance of a consistent and flexible overall plan for us what we learned over the course of many disease outbreaks is that policy changes are probably the hardest on public interface it's really difficult to explain the rationale behind policy changes in the middle of a response so I would say that you know being flexible but also ensuring that we have some consistency is the best way to go and with that I think that's your last slide thanks Lisa and Dana and Mike we will take questions through the chat or the verbal cue if you'd like to ask a question please dial pound two on your telephone keypad you'll hear notification when your line is unmuted and at that time state your name and question alternatively you may select all panelists from the drop-down menu in the chat panel and enter your question in the message box provided look at people just a couple minutes to see if there was any questions I think the information that was presented was great very interesting okay we still don't have any questions in the chat are there any verbal two questions at this time we have no questions in the verbal cue okay well on behalf of the National Training and exercise program I'd like to thank all of our speakers today we're getting a couple comments in here that says this is a great presentation great presentation thanks to all and also I want to thank everybody for all the join the webinar and as a little plug for the nat
onal training and exercise program if you have any ideas for webinars that you know we can explore for our emergency preparedness community please feel free to contact us and we also on all of our TEP videos or webinars are hosted on the video gallery online which is posted FS USDA animal health training and development video gallery so in the link for the video gallery is listed on the webinar announcement so we do have a couple questions that came through the chat a couple people wanted to know if the powerpoints were available to download I don't know if the speakers are willing to share these powerpoints I don't mind sharing mine okay a monocle imap2 okay so a lot of people have sent in their signed on with their email address I can I can send the presentation to all as a question for Lisa with the recent kovat 19 events how did that affect your interaction the communication with the public did you see any additional challenges as a result that's a great question yeah we did we have both internal challenges with we have certain counties in Southern California who are interpreting the shelter-in-place order more strictly than others and they but we have to obviously I think like many others provide our personnel a document that they could carry so that they you know it could show law enforcement that their job is essential and they're allowed to be out and about doing their job and second of all some of those counties are requiring some sort of face covering not necessarily in ninety five months but they weren't face covering while anyone is out at all and so that was another big change that we had to make sure the writing base covers for all of our personnel and then we also needed to be sympathetic to the public's concerns right we are experiencing public who have concerns about us coming to their premises or going in and testing their birds etcetera mostly we're in backyards and thankfully not in homes but still people are nervous about allowing personnel coming to interact I think it helps that we understand biosecurity like you know a lot of people don't understand biosecurity as much as much very services do and so we are in a very unique place to be able to share a good understanding of disease control and mitigation and biosecurity and so we do try to help the public understand that we're going to use very good biosecurity practices and we're going to carry out our job in the most effective way and you know we have had to overcome some challenges and concerns by public pressure okay there's another question that came in that said from Lisa what would you change on your next response oh my goodness we don't have enough time yeah so is for sure we would change I think I think the biggest thing is the this large scale of a response for the long duration that it went we we probably needed to engage by social media a lot earlier in the response and had a lot bigger presence in general just you know with educating the public and messaging and things like that I would say that one of the biggest take homes would be you know just helping the pot the general public understand more about what we're trying to get done and it's a challenge you know there's when I say that it is not meant to be derogatory to anybody who worked in the public information or public affairs fear it isn't it was just a huge challenge for us and I think we kind of came to the social media party a little bit late and so I would definitely start by sharing those videos and best practices of biosecurity and start with lots of education to community I think that is one take-home message that we got loud and clear hey do we have any questions in the verbal cue no questions in the queue at this time okay well we just passed our five minutes past our hour-long webinar again I'd like to thank everybody who attended and of course thank you to all the speakers it was very interesting next one which you also know that on the 22nd the NTP will be presenting basic principles of composting and USDA APHIS protocols for in-house composting of turkeys during a van influenza outbreak will be presented and with that I will wish you all a great rest of your day that concludes our conference thank you for users and services you may now disconnect
