Report: One in six public health workers would stay home in flu emergency

This isn't encouraging news: A new study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has concluded that if there were a pandemic flu emergency, roughly one in six public health workers would not report to work.

To address this issue, researchers at the school did an online survey among 1,835 public health workers in Minnesota, Ohio and West Virginia from November 2006 to December 2007.  Their analysis was based on a research approach known as the Extended Parallel Process Model, which assumes that a willingness to follow instructions in an emergency will come from their perception of a threat's validity, belief that actions taken can be realistically accomplished and will have a positive impact on the threat.

Public health workers who were concerned about the threat of a pandemic, confident that they could fulfill their roles and felt they could have a meaningful impact on the situation were 31 times more likely to respond to work than those who felt that the threat was low and had little confidence they could help.

To learn more about the study:
- read this UPI piece

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