Approximately 1 in 6 public health workers said they would not report to work during a pandemic flu emergency regardless of its severity, according to a survey led by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers.

Still, this was an improvement from 2005, when more than 40 percent of public health employees said they were unlikely to report to work during a pandemic emergency. The online survey was conducted among 1,835 public health workers in Minnesota, Ohio and West Virginia from November 2006 to December 2007.

“Employee response is a critical component of preparedness planning, yet it is often overlooked. Our study is an attempt to understand the underlying factors that determine an employee’s willingness to respond in an emergency,” says Bloomberg School of Public Health professor Daniel Barnett, M.D. “Overall, 16 percent of the workers surveyed said they would not report regardless of the severity of the outbreak.”

According to the survey, public health workers who were both “concerned” about the threat posed by a pandemic, and who were “confident” that they could fulfill their response roles and that their roles would have a meaningful impact on the situation, were 31 times more likely to respond to work in an emergency than those who perceived the threat low and had low levels of confidence. Workers whose perception of the threat was “low” but who strongly believed in the efficacy of their job were 18 times more likely to say they would respond compared to those in the “low threat/low efficacy” group.