Director of Public Health Health Protection Assurance Report

Planning for emergency situations, such as extreme weather events, outbreaks, or terror incidents, takes place at regional and local levels: The Local Health Resilience Partnership (LHRP) is responsible for ensuring that the arrangements for local health protection responses are robust and resilient. The LHRP works with the Local Resilience Forum (LRF) and multiagency partners, to develop collective assurance of local arrangements.

UKHSA co-ordinate the health management of the response to biological, chemical, radiological and environmental incidents, including specialist services which provide management advice and/or direct support to incident responses.

In North Tyneside there is the Emergency Planning Leadership Group (EPLG) that meets monthly, the role of this group is to ensure that the council is equipped to respond to an emergency. This includes reviewing and developing internal policies and plans, engagement in and sharing the learning from exercises and reviewing and learning from local emergency situations e.g., flooding. This group feeds into the LHRP and the LRF.

The DPH continues to be part of regional on-call arrangements to chair the Scientific and Technical Advice Cell (STAC), convened by UKHSA to coordinate such advice in the event of an emergency incident.