Letter from RADM Ali Khan to State Health Officers

Dear Colleagues:

In an attempt to assure the best possible program to support applied epidemiology in your state, an external peer review of the CDC Career Epidemiology Field Officer (CEFO) Program will be conducted in June 2011 by CDC’s Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response (OPHPR) Board of Scientific Counselors (BSC).

As an important part of this evaluation, we will be asking for the input of your State Preparedness Director and State Epidemiologist, based on their knowledge and interactions with the CEFO Program and the CEFOs themselves. We will send an email with a link to a survey to capture your staff’s input on April 4, 2011.

The survey results will be part of the information that will be used to inform the program review. The questions in the survey are focused on knowledge about the CEFO Program, the local needs that CEFOs address, and the support that the CEFO Program headquarters staff provides. The survey takes approximately 18 minutes to complete. It is critical that we obtain your jurisdiction’s input whether or not you currently have a CEFO.

Briefly, the CEFO Program is dedicated to strengthening epidemiologic and scientific support of preparedness activities and enhancing public health surveillance systems by placing CDC epidemiologists, by request, in state and local health departments (see attached fact sheet). CEFO positions are funded through the direct assistance mechanism of the requesting health department’s Public Health Emergency Preparedness cooperative agreement allocation. The requesting agency commits to funding the CEFO position initially for two years with the option to renew the request annually. There are currently 30 CEFO assignees located in 23 state or local public health departments.

Once we have written the results of the survey analyses, we will share a summary report with you, as well as the results and recommendations of the Board of Scientific Counselors’ review when they are finalized.

If you have any questions about the survey, please contact Nadine Oosmanally [email: noosmanally@cdc.gov or telephone (770) 488-8809]. If you have questions about the CEFO Program, please contact Dr. John Horan at (770) 488-6095.

Sincerely,

RADM Ali S. Khan, MD MPH (USPHS)

Assistant Surgeon General and Director

Office of Public Health Preparedness & Response

DHHS/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Cc:

Dan Sosin

Barbara Ellis

Christine Kosmos

Jeff Bryant

John Horan

Linda Neff

Cherie Drenzek

Nadine Oosmanally

ASTHO

NACCHO

CSTE

OSTLTS