Planning and Exercise - Principles of Emergency Management - page 246

− At what point will the hospital resources become overwhelmed?
− How will public information be handled?
− How will decontaminated be handled of the victims, ambulances, and
hospital equipment?
Potential Outcome of This Workshop
− This forum allows for all participants in the room to understand and
learn the responsibilities and tasks of the other hospital departments.
− Provides the opportunity for corrections and updates to be made to the
old plan.
− Provides the opportunity for all of the departments to provide input
to their roles and responsibilities as well as provide comment on other
department responsibilities.
− Prepares and trains the participants for more advanced exercises.
2. Example Workshop Exercise
The City of Denmar has existing plans and procedures that are exercised and
reviewed on a yearly basis. In six months, the city will be participating in a
TTX with other nearby cities. In one year, the city will be participating in a
large full-scale regional and statewide exercise. Additionally, the city recently
annexed land and purchased water and sewer utility plants and services. The
design team consists of the emergency manager, city mayor, and a representa-
tive from the police, fire, public health, water, and wastewater utilities.
The design team determines that the objectives will be to ensure updates of
existing plans, address the addition of the water and wastewater utilities, prac-
tice topics that may be addressed in the upcoming exercises, and begin a dis-
cussion of media and public information issues that may be used as a public
information and media plan annex to the existing emergency operations plan.
The design team finds that the amount of material and topics is extensive and
unproductive to present to a single group. They design the workshop to start
as a presentation to all participants and then have the participants break into
work groups in the same room to discuss among themselves the issues that
have been assigned to them.
The design team uses the list of invites to determine who will be assigned
to which breakout group. They also define the breakout groups to be
Preparedness, Response, Recovery and Media, and Public Information. The
design team develops a list of questions and topics that each breakout group
will need to address during the workshop. During the last two hours of the
workshop, each group will be provided with time to present their findings to
the entire room.
Action items will be compiled and assigned to the various groups, as needed.
The participants determine that their action items and list of things to be
completed include updating a communications and contact list, add the
new water and wastewater facilities to the existing city emergency operations