Executive Summary and Information Paper

It's been a week since the end of my POPM, so I've been a bit of a slacker about writing about the end of it. Sorry. Overall, it was a really good rotation and taught me a lot about the necessary steps in making policy (it's not a short nor simple process).

Most of my work during the rotation involved reading memos and proposed regulations and comparing them to current regulations to see how they fit (and that was an oversimplification of the whole thing). I also researched current issues that were coming in to POPM (things that people from outside the Office of the Surgeon General thought needed attention) and tried to make a decision about how important it would be. One of those issues was a report of twelve cases of swine flu (a different swine flu, not H1N1) in five states. After doing research, which mostly consisted of reading what the CDC has to say about it, I wrote an executive summary and information paper. Also easier said than done.

An executive summary is a short and concise summary of an issue, and there are very specific formatting rules for it, from the font and size to the fact that it has to be fewer than fifteen lines of information. Here's my EXSUM (we like acronyms):

(U) 12 HUMAN CASES OF INFLUENZA A(H3N2)v IN THE US.  (U) (DASG-PPM-NC)  Since August 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported 12 human cases in five states of swine-origin influenza A (H3N2)v.  No cases have been reported among DoD beneficiaries.  Severity of illness is similar to seasonal influenza with three hospitalizations and no deaths.  The majority of cases occurred in children who have had contact with swine, with evidence of limited human-to-human transmission.  CDC provides interim guidance to clinical and laboratory personnel for surveillance and testing.  MEDCOM provided guidance to Army medical treatment facility laboratories on 13 Jan 2012 regarding typing and subtyping of specimens. Preventive medicine personnel will report all confirmed, probable, or suspected influenza A(H3N2)v cases in Disease Reporting System Internet and to local public health authorities.  Healthcare personnel should encourage beneficiaries to be immunized against seasonal influenza, as this may confer partial protection against influenza A(H3N2)v virus.     

If, after reading an EXSUM, someone wants more information, they request it and are provided an information paper, which, as it sounds, contains more information. It's supposed to be less than one page (again, very specific formatting rules), but can be longer. Mine was about a paragraph onto the second page, and I won't subject you to that.

So now that I'm done with POPM, I'm spending a little bit of time hanging out at WRAIR on what we refer to as "research downtime". Unfortunately, my research project happens to be at that exact place where there is nothing I can do to accelerate it, which makes my research downtime more of just, well, downtime. It's given me the opportunity to work out during the lunch hour, which is quite enjoyable, and get my poster ready to present at the ACPM conference in a couple of weeks. And get caught up on sleep, which after the commute I had to go down to Falls Church, was a bit lacking.