The Center for Field Epidemic Intelligence, Research, and Professional Development (CFEIR) was established in April 2021, during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The mission of CFEIR is to establish strong relationships between counterparts by developing a public health workforce which can detect public health crises, respond promptly and accurately to an outbreak using risk assessment skills, consider short and long-term preventive measures, can make recommendations, and provide feedback in either local or global settings.
Under this mission, the three divisions in CFEIR will conduct the following operations:
- Apply field epidemiology to support public health authorities in responding to health crises, focusing primarily on infectious diseases.
- Collect, analyze, conduct risk assessments, and plan response measures if needed on domestic and international health crisis events, using applied field epidemiology.
- Develop a workforce which can take on leadership roles during a health emergency response through the Field Epidemiology Training Program (FETP). FETP is an on-the-job style training program and fellows work in the following activities:
- Participation of outbreak investigation
- Evaluation, modif ication, and utilization of infectious disease surveillance
- Conduct risk assessment and participate in response against public health crisis
- Conduct epidemiological studies
- Contribute to prevention of outbreak recurrence activities
- Establish and maintain a network of FETP graduates, both domestically and internationally
- Provide information to support prevention planning measures
- Division I:
- Division for Epidemic Intelligence Training and Practice (EITP) Standardization, quality improvement, and implementation of applied f ield epidemiology
- Division II:
- Division for Epidemic Intelligence Analysis and Feedback (EIAF) Feedback and communication of public health information to the public and stakeholders
- Division III:
- Division for Global Health Workforce Development (GHWD) Collaboration with overseas FETP and preparation for international dispatch