Public Health Emergency Preparedness Exercises: Lessons Learned

Abstract

Preparedness exercise program has two aims: (1) educating the public health workforce on key public health system emergency preparedness issues, and (2) identifying specific systems-level challenges in the public health response to large-scale events. Rigorous evaluation of 38 public health emergency preparedness (PHEP) exercises employing realistic scenarios and reliable and accurate outcome measures has demonstrated the usefulness of PHEP exercises in clarifying public health workers' roles and responsibilities, facilitating knowledge transfer among these individuals and organizations, and identifying specific public health systems-level challenges.

Modelling Mass Casualty Decontamination Systems Informed by Field Exercise Data

“…To prepare for such an incident the emergency services perform field exercises using volunteer “casualty” actors. While these exercises can be extremely useful for testing responses and can help to identify important lessons for the future [7] they are highly resource intensive to stage. One partial solution to this problem is the use of computer simulation via operational research techniques.…”

Development of an Online Toolkit for Measuring Performance in Health Emergency Response Exercises

“…14 There are many reasons for this, and many barriers to effective exercise evaluation that have been described previously in the literature, including a lack of expertise, a lack of sufficient time, a lack of funding, and poorly defined exercise objectives. 6 Therefore, the aim of this project was to develop an exercise evaluation toolkit that could assist exercise planners in their evaluation of Emergency Preparedness exercises. In an attempt to address the barrier of a lack of evaluation expertise, the toolkit was designed with a database of previously vetted and tested measures of performance, as well as an exercise evaluation tool that prompts the user to gather observations in a standardized manner and to grade the essential elements of performance for a given response objective.…”

“…[1][2][3] As proxies for actual emergencies, emergency response exercises can improve an organization's employees' fluency with existing plans and can provide opportunities to practice how different organizations and disciplines will work together to respond capably during emergency events. [4][5][6][7] Also, and perhaps most importantly, exercises provide an opportunity to identify specific problems with an organization's emergency planning, training, and/or response that are in need of improvement before an actual disaster event occurs. 1 Unfortunately, the lack of commonly accepted, valid, and reliable measurement processes to use when quantifying the individual elements of performance in an exercise has limited many organizations' ability to feel certain that they have captured and documented the key successes and response challenges from their exercises accurately.…”

Continued Vigilance – Development of an Online Evaluation Tool for Assessing Preparedness of Medical Facilities for Biological Events

“…Exercises simulating potential scenarios are used to identify public health systems-level challenges (11). Most exercises are time and resource consuming, and therefore are not implemented as frequently as recommended.…”