This series of books is intended to teach the skills which have been traditionally associated with the practice of Emergency Management. This includes all of the skills involved in the assessment of risk, selection of Command and Control models, the writing of an Emergency Plan, the testing of that document by means of various types of Exercises, and the development of employee education programs which are intended to strengthen familiarity with the plan. However, no Emergency Plan is a “blueprint” to guide a community or organization through its successful response to a disaster. Every disaster is different in multiple ways and is extremely complex. If we could simply preplan and preprogram every type of emergency response from start to finish successfully, we would be in possession of crystal balls, and the need for Emergency Managers would be minimal.
This series of books differs from other well-written and useful Emergency Management textbooks in two important respects. First, it will deal exclusively with the practice of Emergency Management as it should occur specifically within a healthcare setting. Second, it will attempt to introduce the use of contemporary mainstream business planning practices to the practice of Emergency Management, something with the potential to build bridges between the Emergency Manager and the senior executive who has little knowledge or understanding of the subject.
The application of Emergency Management to a healthcare setting is essential. It can be argued that any healthcare institution is, in fact, a highly specialized community. It can also be argued that virtually every type of service or agency found in a normal community has some type of counterpart within the specialized community of a healthcare setting. It is also important to remember that the vast majority of a community’s most vulnerable population will typically be found within some sort of healthcare setting, whether an acute care hospital, a specialty care hospital, or a long-term care facility. In order to mitigate against such vulnerabilities and to protect those who possess them, a certain degree of understanding of the clinical context is required. The clinical context is, in the majority of cases, a substantive source of each individual’s vulnerability. This is not to say that the Emergency Manager must be an expert clinician, but they do need to possess an understanding of relevant clinical issues. In Emergency Management, the best Emergency Manager available cannot simply be “dropped” into a hospital to work, any more than they can do so in an oil refinery, a postsecondary institution, a busy international airport, or any other highly specialized institution.
This series of books will attempt to introduce several new mainstream business and academic concepts into the practice of Emergency Management. These will include formal Project Management, applied research methodology, root cause analysis, Lean for Healthcare, and Six Sigma. All of these concepts have a potentially valuable contribution to make to the effective practice of Emergency Management. Of equal importance is the fact that for many years the Emergency Manager has been challenged to affect the types of preparedness and mitigation-driven changes that are required within the organization or the community. Part of this has been the challenge of limited resources and competing priorities, but an equally important aspect of this has been the fact that the Emergency Manager has typically used a skill set and information generation and planning processes which were not truly understood by those to whom they reported and from whom they required project approval.
These mainstream business and academic processes and techniques are precisely the same ones which are used to train senior executives and CEOs for their own positions. As a result, the information generated is less likely to be misunderstood or minimized in its importance, because it comes from a process which the senior executive knows and uses every working day. This “de-mystifies” the practice and the process of Emergency Management, giving the Emergency Manager, and Emergency Management itself, dramatically increased understanding and credibility, potentially making the Emergency Manager a “key player” and contributor to the management team of any organization in which they work, and far more likely to be regarded as an expertise resource.