NMsphere is New Mexico’s Site for Public Health Emergency Response Education. We want to help you, as a health/medical professional, be better prepared to respond to public health emergencies. This website helps you find current NM trainings, drills and exercises related to health emergency management. Choices range from traditional classroom settings to live conferences to online, self-paced training.

To learn more about NMsphere, click on any of the below topics:

History of NMsphere

NMsphere has been evolving over the last five years with the help of a CDC grant. Education and training are vital to health/medical professionals’ preparedness for responding to large-scale public health emergencies. People learn in different ways, so NMsphere uses a combination of instructor-led training, satellite broadcasts, videoconference training, self-paced online learning, webcasts, and hands-on drills and exercises. Training activities have increased in NM around such areas as basic all-hazard emergency planning & preparedness; the Incident Command System (ICS); establishment of Incident Command Posts (ICP) and Points of Dispensing (POD); disease surveillance, monitoring & investigation; emergency communications; disaster mental health & psychosocial issues; and community preparedness.

NMsphere has an active advisory body, the Education and Training Advisory Committee (ETAC), helping to ensure that NM’s health/medical professionals’ current and future health emergency management training needs are being met.

CDC’s Grant

NMsphere is funded by a grant from The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and is one part of a comprehensive grant workplan. The Epidemiology & Response Division of the NM Department of Health applies for money each year through a cooperative agreement with CDC entitled Public Health Preparedness & Response for Bioterrorism. The grant’s purpose is to upgrade and integrate State & local public health jurisdictions’ preparedness for, and response to, terrorism and other public health emergencies with Federal, State, local, tribal and border governments, the private sector, and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). These efforts are required to support the National Response Plan (NRP) and the National Incident Management System (NIMS).

The federal government has issued standards, sets of scenarios, and lists of capabilities for States to use to improve health emergency preparedness & response. The main intent of the CDC funding is for States to immediately establish, use, and continually improve the national system, using the following CDC Preparedness Goals to measure performance:

Prevent:
(1) Increase the use and development of interventions known to prevent human illness from chemical, biological, radiological agents, and naturally occurring health threats.
(2) Decrease the time needed to classify health events as terrorism or naturally occurring, in partnership with other agencies.

Detect/ Report:
(3) Decrease the time needed to detect and report chemical, biological, radiological agents in tissue, food or environmental samples that cause threats to the public’s health.
(4) Improve the timeliness and accuracy of information regarding threats to the public’s health as reported by clinicians and through electronic early event detection, in real time, to those who need to know.

Investigate:
(5) Decrease the time to identify causes, risk factors, and appropriate interventions for those affected by threats to the public’s health.

Control:
(6) Decrease the time needed to provide countermeasures and health guidance to those affected by threats to the public’s health.

Recover:
(7) Decrease the time needed to restore health services and environmental safety to pre-event levels. (8) Increase the long-term follow-up provided to those affected by threats to the public’s health.

Improve:
(9) Decrease the time needed to implement recommendations from after-action reports following threats to the public’s health.

ETAC – A Cooperative Effort

The NM State Education & Training Advisory Committee (ETAC) has been in existence since November 2003. Currently, there are 9 grants awarded in NM related to emergency preparedness and response. A meeting, called by the Office of Health Emergency Management/Epidemiology & Response Division/NM Dept of Health, was held on 11/3/03 which pulled together representatives from the various grants. The purpose was to exchange information on activities and to explore how all the groups might coordinate and collaborate together.

The grants and entities agreed to the benefit of collaboration, and the group named itself the Education & Training Advisory Committee (ETAC). The groups also identified a mission: “to maximize the positive impact of training on health/medical emergency preparedness and emergency management through collaboration and coordination of efforts that cross programs, organizations, and populations.” ETAC meets on a regular basis, including smaller workgroups that meet to tackle various statewide projects.

Some of ETAC’s collaborative efforts:

• Creation and ongoing training of the statewide awareness-level course: Answering The Call – Health and Medical Emergency Preparedness & Response in NM
• Identification of NM’s core competencies for public health emergency management
• Identification of NMsphere’s training categories, which you can use in choosing appropriate training for your response role
• Creation of a training needs assessment tool, which directly correlates to the core competencies, which individuals or agencies can use to determine their training needs.

The grants/organizations represented on ETAC are:

• From the University of New Mexico (UNM), Department of Emergency Medicine/ Center for Disaster Medicine
• SWCPHP (Southwest Center for Public Health Preparedness) – acting as liaison between NM and the Southwest Center for Public Health Preparedness, Univ. of Oklahoma – a CDC/DHHS grant
• Critical Response & Emergency Systems Training (CREST) – a HRSA/DHHS grant
• Medical Reserve Corps (MRC) – a DHHS grant
• School Nurse & Public Health Emergency Preparedness – a NIH/DHHS grant
• From the NM Department of Health (NMDOH)
• Public Health Preparedness & Response to Bioterrorism – a CDC/DHHS grant
• Bioterrorism Hospital Preparedness Program – a HRSA/DHHS grant
• Disaster Mental Health Training – a SAMHSA grant
• WIPP – a DOE-funded program
• From the NM Department of Public Safety
• Emergency Preparedness & Response – funding from DOJ, FEMA, ODP
• Other organizations working with grants, such as Albuquerque Technical Vocational Institute, Workforce Training Center; NM Primary Care Association; and NM Hospitals and Health Systems Association
  

Types of Training Available

People have their own preferences for how they like to learn new information and skills. NMsphere offers educational opportunities using a variety of delivery methods, with more on the horizon (see NMsphere News). Be sure to read the learning activity’s description to see how it’s being offered, which could be one, or more, of the following methods:

• Audio Segment
• "Blended” Training, incorporating several delivery methods
• Book
• CD-Rom
• Classroom Training
• Drill
• DVD
• Exercise (table tops, functional or full scale)
• Recorded (video) Class
• Self-paced Web Based Training
• Video-conference Training (live)
• Video Segment
• Web-conference Training (live)

The Learning Management System

A Learning Management System, or LMS, is exactly what it sounds like: a specialized software system for managing learning. The NMsphere LMS, which is currently being built and tested, will provide three major benefits. First, it will allow you to manage your training over the Internet. You can search for classes; add them to, or drop them from, your personal calendar; plan for future training; and view and print reports pertaining to your training. You can keep a record of all of your role-related education, even training taken elsewhere, in one central location, accessible from any Web-connected computer.

In addition, the LMS acts as a platform from which you can launch self-paced Web-based courses, day or night, whenever is most convenient for you. The system tracks your progress through courses, stores your scores, and automatically places a bookmark in each course if you exit before finishing, so you can return later. Some courses will test your knowledge before you begin and will automatically turn off modules covering material that you’ve already mastered, keeping you from spending unnecessary time in the course.

The third major benefit of the LMS is that it allows the ETAC partners to collect accurate statistical data about public health emergency preparedness and response training across the state. This data can be reported back to the various grantor organizations, and will help ensure that New Mexico continues to receive much needed Federal funds to support state response and preparedness efforts.

We anticipate the NMsphere LMS will be ready for you to use in late 2006. At that time, the “Log On” link in the menu to your left will be available so you can access the LMS and take advantage of all that it has to offer. Please check our NMsphere News section for progress reports during the upcoming months.

For more information about the LMS, see our Frequently Asked Questions/Questions about the NMsphere Learning Management System (LMS).