Disaster and Terrorism Response and Recovery Stress Management Interventions and Treatment Children and Families Workplace Preparedness Public Education and Community Leadership Military Health Courage to Care Resources for Recovery Joining Forces Newsletter Law Enforcement

Interviews Post 9/11 Disaster and Military Psychiatry Articles and Reports Terrorism Preparedness Disaster Psychiatry Military Psychiatry Treatment Guidelines Workplace Joining Forces Newsletter Research Books CDs Public Education Conferences

Education

Office of Public Education and Preparedness

The Office of Public Education and Preparedness (OPEP) develops and conducts educational initiatives that advance the Center’s subject matter expertise, understanding the psychological and behavioral implications of traumatic events to foster preparedness, response, recovery and resilience in military and civilian populations.

Courage to Care, a military health communication campaign to improve the well being of deployed soldiers and their families, is an ongoing OPEP initiative. Courage to Care features electronic fact sheets developed by military health experts from Uniformed Services University that are distributed to military and civilian health and human service providers on a range of issues affecting this population: Reintegration, Psychological First Aid, Flu, and Helping National Guard and Reserve Reenter the Workplace. Courage to Care has generated widespread media attention.

The preparedness and resilience of our nation’s workplaces is an area of great importance to OPEP. Funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has supported a study of the barriers and opportunities that exist within American corporations around human continuity and crisis management of the threat or actuality of terrorism and bioterrorism.

In 2004, OPEP developed a Workplace Resiliency Model for Disaster Consequence Management that was presented at national and international conferences including the American Public Health Association (APHA).

OPEP has organized a unique art event, Our Nation’s Resilience: Paintings, Public Education and Preparedness for Terrorism, that will be exhibited in the Russell Rotunda of the Senate Office Building on the anniversary week of September 11th, 2005. The exhibit with consist of 19 paintings created by high school students in Washington, D.C. after the anthrax attacks of 2001, the exhibit educates the public and its leaders about exposure to weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and how terrorism preparedness can foster the resilience of individuals, families, schools, communities and the workplace and enhance the homeland security of our nation.