Do you believe that the funding for preparedness and training will get better? Do you believe there will be more time for training in the future? Alternatively, do you believe that the public will understand our unprepared state because we are too busy with other priorities?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may be waiting for something that never comes to fruition. Because of these givens, we are forced to come up with creative ways to train together. Collaboration is built through preparedness activities, such as training, and not at the incident.
Levels of Training
Training and education involve numerous levels of physical and cognitive activities that help to prepare emergency and disaster management personnel to deliver the correct actions and thought processes during a disaster.
Within each organization will exist levels to which differing activities will be assigned or expected. At the most basic level of the organization, personnel will actually complete the tasks that deliver a disaster response, whether that consists of search and rescue or clearing streets. Personnel at this level must understand how to carry out the tasks and how to work with each other to accomplish their duties. Additionally, they must understand the resources utilized during the task and how to obtain more resources if needed.
Moving up the organization, supervisory personnel must understand and be able to execute setting up the tasks that meet the objectives. If this is delivering water, they must be able to set up delivery points and manage a supply chain that will ensure the resource (water) is obtained.
Finally, at the top level of the organization, the persons must be able to work within the overall response network ad understand the need for their service. Using the water example, these personnel must understand when and where the water is needed and for what duration the distribution will occur. This skill set at this level generally involves many collaboration and communication abilities.
Conducting Drills
Most organizations have a very limited time schedule to train. For example, police often train off duty, which can incur great overtime costs to the community.
From a creativity standpoint, we must utilize time and technology to carry out training. Many police officers now have computers in their vehicle to aid in response. What about having the officer complete an online ICS course or watch a video on disaster response while sitting on the side of the road running the radar gun? Of course, when a speeder comes by, they will need to pause the video, but it is this type of creativity that will allow task level responders to remain proficient.
More to Think About
These are some thoughts for the first of our series on how to train in a world filled with many demands on our nation’s disaster management personnel. Next, we will discuss how to keep various task level responders trained and delve into how to develop disaster executives.
We Do Not Have a Plan for Training: Part I | [link url=”https://amuedge.com/we-do-not-have-a-plan-for-training-part-2/” title=”Part II”] | [link url=”https://amuedge.com/we-do-not-have-a-plan-for-training-part-3/” title=”Part III”]
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