Center for Infectious Diseases & Emergency Readiness

Following a multi-agency, multi-level statewide functional exercise in California, we distributed a web-based survey to exercise participants to identify factors that promoted organizational participation in the exercise. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic attempt to understand which factors influence organizational participation in statewide exercises. Awareness of these factors will be useful for promoting participation in future exercises and enable state officials to prioritize resources for the design and conduct of statewide exercises.This paper focuses on factors that encouraged participation, particularly that of local health departments.