The Preparedness Lab

Flatten the Curve... of Learning

Interactive tools for teaching outbreak preparedness and response — designed for educators, training programmes, and public health professionals who want their learners to think, decide, and not just remember.

The tools here grew from a recurring observation across clinical, policy, and teaching settings: that the concepts most essential to outbreak preparedness — navigating uncertainty, balancing competing interests, knowing when the evidence is enough — are rarely learned well through passive instruction. They are learned by doing, and specifically by doing something that carries consequences, even simulated ones.

If you teach, train, or design learning experiences in outbreak preparedness and response — and you've ever wished your learners had to actually grapple with a decision before the answer was handed to them — you're in the right place.

Explore the tools Get in touch

Teaching tools

Built to make learners decide

The tools here are proof of concept as much as they are finished products. Each one started with a specific teaching problem: a concept that wasn't landing, a case study that deserved more than a lecture slide, a skill that could only be built through practice. The interactive architecture came from asking what it would actually take for a learner to feel the tradeoff, not just understand it.

These tools have been used in postgraduate classrooms and professional training settings, and adapted for different regional contexts and audience levels. All are free to use for non-commercial teaching and training purposes. Most are adaptable — to different contexts, audiences, and settings — and the list of problems that deserve this kind of treatment is much longer than what's here so far.

Original work

Strategic Outbreak Response Simulation

A multiplayer simulation in which teams navigate a novel outbreak across six escalating phases — from an unknown pathogen with limited data, through transmission confirmation, peak pressure, public fatigue, and transition to recovery. Each phase presents a menu of non-pharmaceutical interventions with real tradeoffs across health outcomes, economic impact, community trust, equity, and resource constraints.

Stakeholder pressure systemThree constituencies escalate demands across rounds and can block specific interventions if neglected.

Preparedness consequence engineEarly-round decisions carry forward, creating region-specific benefits or penalties in later phases.

Evidence-tier frameworkInterventions are tagged by strength of evidence, rewarding evidence-based reasoning.

Misinformation challenge mechanicActive misinformation scenarios disrupt team strategy mid-round.

Community-led alternativesEvery round includes zero-cost grassroots options alongside government interventions.

After-action debriefSurfaces the downstream consequences of each team's decisions across the full arc.

Designed for facilitated use in postgraduate teaching, professional training, and tabletop exercise settings. Regional and pathogen parameters are adaptable for different outbreak scenarios.

See how it works Student demo Instructions & scoring Request access

Exercise architecture

Interactive Exercise Series

Built as companions to The Formula for Better Health by Dr. Tom Frieden

A series of interactive exercises developed to accompany the teaching materials for The Formula for Better Health. The underlying case studies, pedagogical framework, and content are Dr. Frieden's. The contribution here is the interactive exercise architecture — the structural design that turns each case into a decision-based learning experience.

Decision-point structureLearners commit choices before reasoning is revealed, preventing passive reading of feedback.

Dual-mode designUndergraduate and graduate modes toggle cognitive demand on the same material.

Consequence engineDecisions carry forward across acts, making the relationship between choices operational.

Consistency-check mechanismSurfaces contradictions between a learner's own analysis and their subsequent design decisions.

Assumption-recording frameworkLearners commit stated assumptions before outcomes, making the debrief accountable to their own logic.

Scenario formatsInbox simulations and cohort dashboards replicate the actual information environment of a decision-maker.

Each exercise is designed for standalone use within a structured course or workshop. Visit formulateaching.theformulaforbetterhealth.net for the full instructor resources.

Chapter 2Why We Ignore Warnings

→

Chapter 3The Pathway to Progress

→

Chapter 4Believe in a Healthy Future

→

Chapter 5Organize for Impact — Cholera

→

Chapter 5Organize for Impact — Unknown Respiratory Illness

→

Chapters 3–5Smallpox Eradication

→

Chapters 1–5MDR-TB, New York City

→

Chapters 7 & 8Ebola in Guinea

→

Chapters 8 & 1Smoke-Free New York

→

Beyond what's here

The list is longer than what's here

The same approach — translating a teaching problem into an interactive decision architecture — applies across a much wider range of contexts in public health training and education. Some examples of what that might look like:

Laboratory capacity and accreditation

Walking health workers through accreditation standards as an interactive decision sequence, rather than a static checklist or manual.

Public health workforce onboarding

Orienting new staff to outbreak protocols and institutional systems through scenario-based exercises that build judgment, not just familiarity.

Risk communication practice

Designing messages for different audiences, outbreak stages, and trust contexts, with feedback that surfaces the consequences of each choice.

One Health tabletop exercises

Cross-sectoral teams navigating a zoonotic spillover event, with mechanics that make the human-animal-environment interface operationally real.

Surveillance system design

Building a sentinel network under resource and time constraints, with competing priorities that force genuine tradeoffs.

Policymaker decision support

Translating outbreak modelling outputs and epidemiological evidence into decision-relevant formats for non-technical audiences.

Community and school-level education

Making epidemic dynamics tangible for younger or non-specialist audiences through simplified but structurally honest simulations.

Something not on this list

If you have a teaching problem in the outbreak preparedness space that belongs here — or one that doesn't — get in touch.

About

Dr. Louisa Sun

Dr. Louisa Sun (MB BS, MMed (Int Med), MRCP(UK), MPH) is an infectious diseases and public health physician based in Singapore. She is Head and Consultant of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Alexandra Hospital, National University Health System, and a Visiting Consultant at the National Centre for Infectious Diseases.

Her clinical work spans infectious disease medicine, infection prevention and control, and antimicrobial stewardship. She has led outbreak response operations at the institutional level — including large-scale field response during the COVID-19 pandemic — and contributes to national public health policy across communicable disease governance and antimicrobial resistance. Globally, she is engaged in outbreak preparedness and response through the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN).

In education, she has contributed to the development and delivery of postgraduate programmes in infectious disease emergencies and infection prevention and control, and holds teaching appointments at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore. Building interactive teaching tools has become a distinct thread of this work — one that sits at the intersection of all of it.

If any of that resonates, please get in touch.

Connect on LinkedIn