The Santa Clara County Public Health Department Advanced Practice Center created the Pandemic Influenza School Planning Toolkit to assist local public health agencies in partnering with the schools within their jurisdictions for pandemic emergency preparedness planning. The toolkit is designed:
- To increase awareness of the threat of a pandemic influenza and its impact on the school community.
- To guide schools in developing specific pandemic influenza measures to integrate into their emergency crisis plans. Specifically,
- To increase preventive health behaviors that limit the spread of viruses, such as a pandemic influenza.
- To continue student learning and core operations during the pandemic.
- To recover, returning to the "new normal," when the pandemic has passed.
A plan template is provided to guide development of pandemic specific measures to augment a school's emergency crisis plan. The plan template is supported by several tools (e.g., communications tools and continuity of instruction tools) to assist schools in completing specific template sections. The template, when completed by a school, becomes the school's pandemic plan.
How to Use Toolkit
The Pandemic Influenza School Planning Toolkit is designed to give you easy access to all of the documents you will need to create your school's pandemic influenza plan. Each document is available in its original format (Microsoft Word or PowerPoint) and as a PDF document,* although a few items are only available as PDF documents.
When you click on either the [Word], [PPT] or [PDF] links in each section, your computer will either open the document or ask you to save it on your computer.
Customizing the Documents
The documents in the Pandemic Influenza School Planning Toolkit can be edited or customized to suit your specific requirements. If you wish to edit or customize these documents, you must have the Microsoft Office applications on your computer and save it to your computer. These documents can be opened and edited using either PC or Mac versions of the Microsoft software.
Many of the documents have fields where information can be inserted or spaces where information specific to your needs can be added. Most of the documents also have a bar graphic heading at the top of the page referencing the APC (Advanced Practice Center). This graphic can be removed if necessary by going to the "View" menu in Microsoft Word and highlighting "Header or Footer." Once the "Header and Footer" view is accessed, you can select the graphic and delete it.
*If you do not have Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, or Adobe Acrobat on your computer, you can download the PDF Reader application from Adobe ((http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html)). The Acrobat Reader will allow you to view and print the PDF documents, but you cannot edit or customize them.