INTRODUCTION:
Household and personal emergency preparedness interventions, such as “go bags”, household emergency plans or stockpiling of emergency supplies, are cornerstones of contemporary practice in emergency and disaster management. Multiple reviews have noted the lack of evidence for the effectiveness of household and personal preparedness activities and called for more research.1-5 High quality research that aims to measure the efficacy of household and personal preparedness interventions on final endpoints is desperately needed to guide practice. However, academics currently lack sound guidance for the design and implementation of this research. Public health, public health ethics and epidemiology are fields with the methodological rigour required to set good design principles for this emerging area of research, representing an opportunity for interdisciplinary collaboration that can contribute to improving the evidence base for emergency preparedness programs.

METHODS:
This workshop aims to bring together public health academics and practitioners attending WCPH, to develop a set of principles to guide the development of research protocols and individual studies on the efficacy of household and personal preparedness interventions. These guidelines may include: Primary outcomes of interest Key ethical considerations Important factors for study design The workshop will use a modified Delphi approach. After the workshop, participants will be invited to join the collaboration and contribute to the final published results. Ethical oversight of the project will be managed by Swinburne University of Technology’s human research ethics committee.

RESULTS:
Results of this workshop will be published in a leading emergency management or public health journal.

CONCLUSIONS:
This workshop will generate a set of guidelines for household and personal preparedness interventions.