When an emergency occurs, it's too late
to start planning a response.
How do you plan for the unexpected?
The first 48 hours is critical,
whether it's stopping a disease outbreak or preventing injury
and death, you have to start
to plan before the emergency occurs -
and when it hits, act fast.
The ability of your Emergency Response plan to sustain
and succeed in any emergency is dependent on the strength
and depth of its roots.
A clearly defined chain of command
and organizational structure, effective resource management,
and advanced planning, are important aspects
of an emergency response.
An Incident Management System, or IMS,
is an internationally recognized model based on these principles.
IMS provides the root structure needed
to grow your emergency response plan and make it strong enough
to withstand natural disasters,
disease outbreaks, or any hazard.
An Emergency Operations Center, or EOC, is the place
from which you run your incident management system.
The EOC is where you collect information, make decisions
about priorities, and coordinate action and communication.
EOCs can expand as the response unfolds and scale
down as the emergency is under control.
EOC's can be big or small, complex or simple,
implemented just as effectively in rural as in urban settings.
EOC's are necessary and achievable.
Simply put, an EOC and any function within it, is:
People, Systems and things.
And of the three, the people
and systems are the most important elements.
For example, you have some people doing contact tracing,
others to analyze the data that's collected.
You have systems that detail how
and when contact tracing is conducted
and how the information is shared during staff meetings.
And, you have things such as the trucks or cars
that contact tracing staff use to get around,
the personal protective gear they may wear when talking
to people within a home, and the printers used
to transmit the data back to the EOC.
Incident management systems implemented as part
of an Emergency Operations Center follow an
established structure.
Following this structure, you can move quickly from planning
to using your EOC which is the key
to being effective in your response.
There are five basic steps
to help move get your EOC set up and ready to use.
With that in mind, first, ensure that you have the laws
and authorities in place to carry
out public health emergency activities.
Second, identify the personnel
who represent the major functions for your area
or across areas, including in particular Rapid Response Teams,
which can be deployed as needed to particular areas.
These teams can be comprised of epidemiologists
or disease surveillance specialists, laboratorians,
and others depending on the needs and scope of the mission.
Third, identify a location, which may depend on the size
of your response or the space you have available to you.
And build out, whether it be from a warehouse or as simple
as a storage cabinet whatever infrastructure is needed
such as computer networks, and secure communication equipment
as well as transportation.
Fourth, use existing training resources
such as the World Health Organization's Framework
for Public Health Emergency Operations Centers or trainers
from CDC to develop standard operating procedures or systems
to run your operation.
Then, train on a routine basis, using exercises
for various scenarios to keep skills and familiarity
with systems routine, so that when the time comes
to activate the EOC, staff can quickly move into action.
Making use of the experiences and lessons learned to correct
and customize plans and SOP's, filling gaps where needed.
What an EOC does is make sure that all the various activities
and stakeholders affected by outbreaks and emergencies work
in sync, making sure that information
and data are shared efficiently and quickly
in a coordinated manner,
communicating essential information
to partners and stakeholders.
Having an EOC structure in place as part
of a country's Incident Management System provides an
invaluable head start in heading off a public health disaster.
For example, in Nigeria, the country was able
to utilize resources devoted to another EOC,
one focused on polio,
and quickly bring together skilled public health personnel
under an EOC devoted to the Ebola outbreak.
This allowed teams and stakeholders
to interface quickly and efficiently,
preventing isolation of individual response elements.
For example, staff conducting contact tracing upon identifying
a symptomatic contact would call into the EOC
and a case management team, ambulance,
and decontamination team would be deployed,
getting the patient quickly
into isolation while the contact tracing team moved to list new
and existing contacts of the affected individual.
This type of rapid response
and coordinated action played a critical role
in containing Ebola's spread,
even among the densely populated areas of Nigeria.
CDC is committed to providing training for those
who want to establish an EOC.
The investment can be minimal, the benefits are priceless.