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Background: Emergency Operations Center (EOC) is a place to provide response to public health emergencies. Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC)’s EOC was officially established in 2016, which has been the core department for the public health emergencies and risk response. In recent years, we have been continuously improving the function of EOC through many incidents. In the study, we hope to share the construction status, operation management experience of China CDC’s EOC and the response process in the human avian influenza A (H7N9) outbreak.Main text: The China CDC’s EOC mainly focus on building the five core elements including sites/places and facilities, information and data, plans and procedures, training and exercises, and logistics. Based on summarizing previous emergency response, the China CDC’s EOC established its own incident management and the standardized response procedures. The event-specific data, context-specific data and event management data could be obtained through various source. The logistics department of the EOC also provides comprehensive support. And that the well-trained staff is another necessary conditions for its operation. Through sharing the response process of H7N9 outbreak, it further explains the EOC’s functions in the five phases of outbreak response, such as the formulation of the incident response framework, monitoring, personnel dispatch and resource mobilization.Conclusions: The EOC contributes to faster and more efficient responses during emergencies which enable a greater reduction in morbidity and mortality. Compared with the traditional incident response process, under the command and coordination of China CDC’s EOC, each group involved in the response has a clearer goal, responsibilities and tasks at each stage. Meanwhile, each group also gave full play to its own expertise and advantages. As a whole, incident response tended to be more specialized and precise, which generally improves the efficiency of incident response. However, different countries and regions have different response processes to the events. We still suggested that appropriate emergency operation plan should be made according to the complexity of incident response in the region when constructing response mechanism, through our experience. And the China CDC’s EOC is still at growing and groping phase.

Background: The EOC of Chinese Center for disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) was officially established in 2016, which has become the core department for the public health emergencies and risk response. In recent years, we have continued to improve and summarize the EOC's role and functions in different events. And we also want to share the construction status and operation management experience of the EOC of China CDC. It is also to promote the construction of global emergency operation management system.Main text: We searched the websites of WHO, USCDC and ECDC for the EOC-related concepts. And through expert interviews and personal communication with experts, we collected relevant opinions and identify additional published literature, then described the current situation of construction of China CDC’s EOC. For EOC, different organizations / agencies have different definitions. In China, the EOC is a place where CDC organizes and conducts the related emergency response work. And it is also an important part of public health emergency system construction. The China CDC’s EOC had developed a series of incident action plan (IAP) and the standardized forms for each incident. The event-specific data, context-specific data and event management data are usually obtained by different system and channel. The China CDC’s EOC would improve the staff’s abilities through an ongoing series of training and exercises. Comparing with before, the efficiency of incident response has been greatly increased after the establishment of EOC.Conclusions: The China CDC’s EOC is still growing and groping phase. It is necessary to continue theoretical learning and practice to continuously improve the capacity of the construction and operations of the EOC system. We need continued close collaboration and partnership with international organizations to enable more to be accomplished through leveraging individual institutional strengths. The standardize approach to respond to public health emergencies meet global standards needs.

Objectives To Share the construction status and operation management experience of the EOC of China CDC. It is also to promote the construction of global emergency operation management system.Methods We searched the websites of WHO, USCDC and EU CDC for the EOC-related concepts. And through expert interviews and personal communication with experts, we collected relevant opinions and identify additional published literature, then described the current situation of construction of China CDC’s EOC. Results For EOC, different organizations / agencies have different definitions. In China, the EOC is a place where CDC organizes and conducts the related emergency response work. And it is also an important part of public health emergency system construction. The China CDC’s EOC had developed a series of incident action plan (IAP) and the standardized forms for each incident. The event-specific data, context-specific data and event management data are usually obtained by different system and channel. The China CDC’s EOC would improve the staff’s abilities through an ongoing series of training and exercises. Comparing with before, the efficiency of incident response has been greatly increased after the establishment of EOC.Conclusions The China CDC’s EOC is still growing and groping phase. It is necessary to continue theoretical learning and practice to continuously improve the capacity of the construction and operations of the EOC system. We need continued close collaboration and partnership with international organizations to enable more to be accomplished through leveraging individual institutional strengths. The standardize approach to respond to public health emergencies meet global standards needs.