Posted: January 7, 2010 - 12:00 pm ET

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has announced the nation's first health security strategy, which focuses on the health of Americans during a large-scale emergency. The strategy establishes priorities for both government and nongovernment activities for the next four years.

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The strategy and implementation guide outline 10 objectives to achieve health security, which include developing and maintaining the workforce needed for national health security; incorporating post-incident health recovery into planning and response; working with cross-border and global partners to enhance national, continental and global health security; and promoting an effective countermeasures enterprise, which is a process to develop, buy and distribute medical countermeasures.

“As we've learned in response to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, responsibility for improving our nation's ability to address existing and emerging health threats must be broadly shared by everyone—governments, communities, families and individuals,” Sebelius said in a news release about the strategy. “The national health security strategy is a call to action for each of us so that every community becomes fully prepared and ready to recover quickly after an emergency.”

According to HHS, federal, state, local, tribal and territorial government agencies—as well as medical, public health and community-based organizations—collaborated to develop the strategy and interim implementation guide. HHS said it also worked with the Institute of Medicine to engage the medical community. The Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act directed the HHS secretary to develop the national health security strategy with an accompanying implementation plan by 2009 and to revise the documents every four years.