Community Quality Emergency Management©
Operational Guidelines
Uri Ben Nesher PhD & Alan Kirschenbaum PhD
What We Aim For
To develop, evaluate and update a generic emergency plan applicable for public sector government agencies, departments and municipalities.
The EDGETrack Solution Includes
Participating in the development of a municipality’s ability to prepare for and operate during crises, emergencies and disasters. Creating a custom made public sector continuity program on the basis of a broad set of realistic scenarios and expected risk contingences. Apply objective measures and assessments that assure a practical and workable emergency public sector continuity plan. Assure maintenance of operations over time and continuously improve the quality of emergency procedures. Focus on employees as a critical asset in the development, maintenance and improvement of a quality emergency public sector continuity program.
How Is It Implemented?
The Community Quality Emergency Management program is designed as a hands-on application that puts world-class experts from a broad range of fields in emergency management in partnership with the organizations’ managers and staff. This integration fosters a partnership whereby your staff act as catalysts in sensitizing the experts to the needs of the agency, and through self evaluations lead to updating and improving the outlines and procedures of a workable quality public sector continuity program.
Why EDGETrack Solutions?
Track record: EDGETrack Solutions has already developed emergency plans for close to 20 municipalities ranging in size from 500,000 to as small as 10-30,000 population, including multiple interdependent cities, small towns (80,000) and regional districts incorporating small urban and farming communities. These plans were developed as the result of the need to being prepared for natural, technological and human-made disasters including war, missile attacks and terror.
Strategy: A generic plan will be developed that will provide standardized protocol procedures within and across municipalities; facilitate the formation of emergency teams and have a built-in training module to evaluate real-time effectiveness.
Generic Emergency Plan: The plan will incorporate the following features: (1) the ability to coordinate resources within and across various municipal and government agencies, (2) be flexible and adaptable to various size and structures of municipalities, (3) provide a basic set of protocols and criteria that are operational in cases of need for external resources, (4) can be utilized at different levels in the organization, from small work groups and departments to divisional level.
Building Emergency Intervention Teams: The generic emergency plans also calls for developing multidisciplinary ‘intervention teams’ including disaster managers, social-psychological professionals, communications-information personnel, public-municipal liaison groups, and various fist responder teams.
Real-Time Effectiveness: Incorporated into the generic plan will be a series of simulation schedules and exercises to test and evaluate the preparedness of the municipality for an emergency. This includes state-of-the-art tabletop simulations that assess critical emergency functions, intervention teams, first responders and evacuation/medical centers. The simulations provide a mechanism for recording conversations as a basis for critical analysis of decision-making processes, the network and sourcing of information, team coordination and developing an overall picture for managing the emergency.
On-going Evaluation: The generic municipal emergency plan also offers a unique feature by providing a basis for upgrading the plan in light of changing resources (budgetary and manpower) and changing potential emergencies (natural to health or terror). The evaluation module incorporated in the generic plan, when matched against new or changing emergency situations, allows flexibility and adaptation for both short and long-term changes, even immediate emergencies.
What is The Pay Off?
General Package: Three basic modules are proposed which can be purchased in a single overall contract or as separate items: (1) generic plans, (2) an effectiveness module and (3) a module for building intervention teams.
Generic Plans: Four general types of generic emergency plans representing standardized disaster management procedures and operative protocols can be developed for implementation. These generic plans can then be adapted to municipalities between 40,000-100,000 populations. Utilizing generic plans will greatly reduce costs by as much as 50 percent without compromising quality if contrasted to preparing such plans on a one-to-one basis. The reasons are stated in the proposal. Development costs of the four generic prototype plans depend on the details that the municipality requires. Actual development time will be between 8-12 months. These plans can then be implemented in a large and diverse number of municipalities that fit the population size criteria. This means that cost per city is low. For single larger sized municipalities, costs will increase proportionately.
Measuring Effectiveness: To test the effectiveness of the emergency plan and update its viability over time, a module based on state-of-the-art simulations can be included into the plan package. Simulation modules are based on providing the soft/hardware simulation technology for the specific sets of alternative scenarios appropriate for each municipality and running a hands-on workshop to evaluate responses and improve performance.
Team Building To build intervention teams will require a workshop of 3-4 days. The costs will depend on the qualifications, number and experience of the municipal employees.
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