Dr. Daniel Barnett, co-author of the study and assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, says employee response is a critical component of preparedness planning, yet it is often overlooked and the study is an attempt to understand the underlying factors that determine an employee's willingness to respond in an emergency.

The researchers also offer some recommendations saying any amount of additional assistance will make a difference in response to an influenza pandemic and they say public health workers need to be better educated and better motivated about their designated roles during the emergency scenario so they understand how they can make a difference.

The researchers say downplaying the threat of the scenario to calm the fears of the workers is not an advisable approach as a sense of threat is an important component in the workers' motivation to prepare for the event and to respond to it.

They also say personal safety assurances of workers can and should be provided as part of training and note that 24% of the respondents did not perceive their work environment as safe, and 15% felt they could not safely arrive to work.

According to the researchers despite growing research examining the willingness to respond to large-scale emergencies, there remains a gap in public health preparedness literature on training approaches that explicitly address response willingness as a discrete outcome.

The research was funded by the U.S. Center for Disease Control's (CDC) Centers for Public Health Preparedness program, and by CDC's Preparedness and Emergency Response Research Centers program and is published in the peer-reviewed online journal PLOS ONE.