With the help of private sector organizations and a successful Continuity of Operations Plan, the Healthcare and Public Health critical sector can remain unharmed. Living in a hazardous world, natural and manmade disasters threaten many aspects of human lives. Unfortunately, the Healthcare and Public Health sector is not exempt from such misfortunes. The healthcare industry, however, is fortunate enough to have learned implementation and integration of risk management procedures in emergency response situations based on lessons learned from previous successful and unsuccessful approaches to disasters and risk assessment. This sector is threatened by natural disasters, health pandemics, terrorist attacks, both physical and virtual, and other manmade hazards (DHS, 2010, p. 1). All of these threats pose a risk to the people working for the healthcare industry, the sector’s physical infrastructure, or they could result in denial of public health services. Active participation in the Department of Homeland Security Strategic Homeland Infrastructure Risk Analysis (SHIRA) process identifies additional possible points of failure to develop further risk management strategies (DHS, 2010, p. 2). Since there …show more content…
The focus of the private sector is turned to the Healthcare portion of this critical sector, because this portion is mostly comprised of privately owned organizations, whereas the public health component is handled by government agencies (DHS, 2010, p. 9). Companies such as Lockheed Martin assume responsibility of the cyber threats to the Healthcare and Public Health critical sector by providing actionable intelligence and effective countermeasure solutions to mitigate cyber threats (Defense & Aerospace Week, 2012, p. 28). Also, since the Healthcare and Public Health sector is responsible for responding to many natural disasters and pandemic outbreaks to the public and the private sectors that they are owned by, it is extremely important that communication is properly