FORCE HEALTH PROTECTION (FHP)
FHP is part of the joint function of protection and promotes, improves, or conserves the behavioral and physical well-being of DoD personnel. For our purposes, tactical medical providers should understand the following FHP functions contained in JP 4-026:
Casualty prevention
- Continuous process conducted during pre-deployment, deployment, and post-deployment phases.
- Example: pre-deployment vaccination.
Preventive Medicine (PVNTMED)
- Involves the surveillance, identification, prevention, and control of communicable diseases, illnesses, and injuries.
- Executing outbreak investigation.
Comprehensive Health Surveillance and Risk Management
- Theater medical surveillance is essential for early identification of health threats to prevent, neutralize, minimize, avoid, or eliminate them.
- Health surveillance includes actions to identify the populations at risk (PARs), identify and assess these populations’ potentially hazardous exposures, and conduct medical surveillance to monitor and report DNBI/battle injury (BI) rates.
- Risk management involves reporting health risks to higher authority in a timely manner using risk communications while employing countermeasures to eliminate or mitigate health risks.
- For additional information about health surveillance in DoD, both in garrison and deployed settings, refer to DODI 6490.03, Deployment Health; DODD 6490.02E, Comprehensive Health Surveillance; and MCM 0028-07, Procedures for Deployment Health Surveillance.
Biosurveillance 6
Process to gather, integrate, interpret, and communicate essential information related to all-hazards, threats, or disease activity affecting human, animal, or plant health.
Goals:
- Achieve early detection and warning.
- Determine most appropriate force health protection posture.
- Contribute to overall situational awareness of the health aspects of an incident.
- Enable better decision making at all levels.
- Cover a range of threats such as:
- WMD or other deliberate attacks.
- An emerging infectious disease.
- Pandemic.
- Environmental disaster.
- Widespread, food-borne illness.
- Key processes include constant scanning of the environment and rapid evaluation to detect threats and assess severity.
- Medical intelligence capabilities and products directly link to biosurveillance efforts Appendix E &F).
- For more information on biosurveillance, refer to ATP 4-02.7/MCRP 4-11.1F/NTTP 4-02.7/AFTTP 3-42.3, Multi-Service Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures for Health Service Support in a Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Environment.