Emergency Management Practices Research Articles

After Action Review of the 2019 measles outbreak in Clark County, Washington, U.S.A

Abstract Issue Clark County experienced a measles outbreak that challenged public health authorities. Description of the practice: We conducted a formal After Action Review with state and local health officials, school officials, and others to identify lessons for public health practitioners facing future outbreaks. Results Following the early identification of measles in a child who had recently arrived from Ukraine, active surveillance identified 71 confirmed cases, most in unvaccinated persons under 18 years of age. 4,138 contacts were traced and public health personnel made daily monitoring calls to 816. 53 potential exposure sites in healthcare facilities, schools and other public places were identified and communicated to the public. As a social distancing measure, unvaccinated students, teachers, and staff were excluded from schools in which exposure had occurred. Ascertaining susceptibility status was challenging. The national anti-vaccination sentiment and a parallel outbreak in a New York religious community created challenges in representing community risk while avoiding stigmatization of a community in which the first reported case was identified. Rather than respond to every false claim on social media, the health department developed talking points about emerging issues and engaged the community in dialogue. Lessons Responding to the measles outbreak required innovative approaches to surveillance and contact tracing, social distancing (school exclusions), and emergency risk communication. The response required extensive coordinated efforts of the county and state health departments, school systems, and many other organizations. Mutual aid enabled an influx of resources but managing the surge of responders proved challenging. Key messages Public health emergencies require effective emergency management practices. Carefully conducted After Action Reviews of health emergencies can help public health practitioners identify challenges and innovative practices.

Good emergency management practices: a review of the core principles, with a focus on preparedness.

Animal health emergencies can also have serious socio-economic and public health consequences, including impacts on human health, as well as food security and safety. Therefore, policy-makers and advisers should take an active part in the development of emergency management systems. A formally structured animal health emergency management system sets out, in a systematic way, the elements required to achieve the necessary level of preparedness, and provides for planning and implementation of the appropriate actions to be taken in an emergency. Good emergency management practices, as laid down by the Emergency Management Centre for Animal Health (EMC-AH) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, should incorporate all four phases of an animal health event: peacetime (i.e. before the event occurs), alert, emergency and reconstruction. Five actions are implemented before, during and after an animal health event: prepare, prevent, detect, respond and recover. A strategic action plan can be drafted to schedule the activities required to develop the emergency management system and increase a country's level of preparedness, step by step. The EMC-AH aims to support all components of emergency management at the national, regional and international levels along this progressive pathway for emergency preparedness.

Best practices for after-action review: turning lessons observed into lessons learned for preparedness policy.

All-hazards preparedness and response planning requires ongoing individual, organisational and multi-jurisdictional learning. Disaster after-action reviews are an established emergency management practice to acquire knowledge through a process of analysing what happened and why, to improve the emergency response before the next crisis. After-action reviews help individuals and organisations learn, and are an essential step in the preparedness cycle. Human and animal health authorities have begun to employ after-action reviews for disaster preparedness and response among public health and Veterinary Services. The World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) encourages Members to establish after-action reviews and share best practice. The adoption of afteraction review is an essential step for all provincial, national and multinational emergency management authorities to mitigate the impact of disasters on human and animal health. Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases with pandemic potential pose unique preparedness challenges, requiring high-level policy attention to close long-standing gaps. A review of after-action reports from the 2001 anthrax bioterror attacks and of naturally occurring infectious disease crises, from the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) to the 2014 Ebola epidemic, reveal a similar pattern of repeated weakness and failures. These phenomena are described as 'lessons observed but not lessons learned'. Most infectious disease outbreaks with pandemic potential are zoonotic and require a One Health approach to prevent, prepare for and respond to global health security crises. After-action reviews in a One Health security context are essential to improve the pandemic preparedness of public health and Veterinary Services. After-action reviews can also provide the evidence-based 'feedback loop' needed to galvanise public policy and political will to translate lessons observed into sustained and applied lessons learned.

Public perception of urban companion animals during the COVID-19 outbreak in China.

This paper responds to the increasing concern regarding the role of non-human life in shaping urban space by exploring the public perception of urban companion animals during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak in China. We argue that the public's perception of urban companion animals during emerging infectious disease outbreaks is related to medical and life science issues and reflects the political, economic, and emotional struggles involved in human-animal multispecies cohabitation. We find that the public has mainly followed and reconstructed medical discourses about the risk of companion animal-to-human transmission and discussed sustainable ethical animal practices in urban public health emergency management during the COVID-19 outbreak. Concerns regarding the risk of companion animal-related infection reflect the increasing prominence of more-than-human families, the pet industry, and multispecies leisure conflicts in public space in Chinese cities. The public's attention to animal ethics has prompted Chinese policy makers to adopt a more morally acceptable model for urban public health emergency management that can be sustained and supported by responsible non-governmental organizations and ethical urban residents.

Supplying the pandemic response: The importance of public procurement

The rapid global transmission of COVID-19 has demonstrated many weaknesses in government procurement of essential supplies. In the United States, these problems have been particularly evident, as systemic fragmentation through federalism has frustrated a coordinated response. Rather than working together, states and localities are competing over limited medical resources, while the federal government has not stepped in to alleviate burdens on the lower tiers of government. In this study, we introduce how procurement is managed under normal circumstances and how it changes during emergencies. Easing procurement rules comes with necessary tradeoffs, particularly involving equity and accountability. Using case studies from recent disasters, we identify procurement and management recommendations for the COVID-19 response and future emergencies. We conclude that public procurement is integral to effective management in the 21st century and must be treated as such in the study and practice of public administration and emergency management.

Hoist the Yellow Flag and Spam® Up: The Separation of Powers Limitation on Hawaii’s Emergency Authority

Hawaii’s government has a long experience responding to public health emergencies. But until 2014, when the Hawaii legislature adopted a comprehensive structural overhaul, Hawaii’s emergency response statutes and organization were a patchwork of scattered provisions that did not conform to modern emergency management and response practices. The law’s first major test has been a dramatic one: the COVID-19 worldwide pandemic. Hawaii’s governor exercised his authority to issue a declaration of emergency, and later issued supplemental proclamations purporting to extend the termination date for the emergency. This article analyzes whether the statute’s internal limitation on delegated emergency power—the “automatic termination” provision, under which an emergency proclamation terminates by law the sixtieth days after it was issued—may be enforced by the courts. It argues that that the circumstances in which a court would sustain a challenge are limited, and that the primary remedy will be a political one. It should not be so, however, because Hawaii precedents confirm that the courts should enforce the essential separation of powers boundaries between the other branches. This article examines the prominent narrative threads that have emerged from Hawaii’s history of adjudicating claims arising out of public health crises, quarantines, and emergencies, as a way of comparing the directions a court might take.

Floating treatment wetland retrofit in a stormwater wet pond provides limited water quality improvements

Floating treatment wetlands (FTW) are an emerging management practice for improving water quality in stormwater wet ponds or other detention basins. Although there is substantial evidence of nutrient reductions by FTW in mesocosm-scale studies, findings from field-scale studies on the water quality benefits of FTW are less conclusive. A medium-sized stormwater wet pond (~0.8 ha) was partially divided using an impermeable liner and monitored for 280 d using a control and FTW treatment (~20–23% FTW coverage) to determine impact of FTW on concentrations of several water quality parameters at the field-scale. Discrete samples and high-frequency, multi-point monitoring were used to assess water quality differences. No significant differences between the two treatments were found for total nitrogen, total Kjeldahl nitrogen, or total phosphorus, based on discrete samples, and in situ monitoring showed dissolved oxygen was significantly lower in the FTW treatment by roughly 2.6 mg L−1. The FTW treatment had significantly higher nitrate concentrations in discrete samples, but this finding was not supported by the high-frequency data collected when considering the full monitoring period. The FTW had significantly lower total suspended solids, based on discrete and high-frequency sampling, and resulted in a 10–43% reduction in TSS (~25% mean reduction), relative to the control. Comparison of subsets of the high-frequency data to discrete sampling data demonstrated how limited discrete sampling can lead to partial information and potentially erroneous conclusions when assessing FTW treatment effect in stormwater, especially when differences in water quality chemistry are small.

Historic Environmental Vulnerability Evaluation of Traditional Villages Under Geological Hazards and Influencing Factors of Adaptive Capacity: A District-Level Analysis of Lishui, China

The historic environmental vulnerability of traditional villages (HEVTVs) is distinctly differentiated; however, the priority of relevant emergency management practices still lacks appropriate evaluation. This study proposes a new assessment system to quantify HEVTVs at the district level and an extended analysis of the influencing factors of adaptive capacity. This provides a basis to classify the emergency management of villages under geological hazard risks. Based on the coupled human–environment system, this research designed the assessment with three criteria, six factors, and 13 indexes from the perspective of HEVTVs. Furthermore, a demonstration test was conducted of 148 traditional villages in Lishui, China. The results showed that 64.19% of HEVTVs in Lishui were moderate or above, and that villages with very high vulnerability were mainly distributed at mid-elevation of mountains with strongly sloping terrain. In contrast, low-vulnerability villages were generally on plains at low altitudes. Furthermore, three high-vulnerability clustering groups were identified as critical improvement targets for which special zoning strategies should be proposed. Five influencing factors were found to be strongly related to the adaptive capacity, indicating a spatial variation of the impact intensity. This could be applied to streamline vulnerability optimization strategies according to local conditions.

Emergency management practice of novel coronavirus pneumonia in designated hospitals/ 中华医院管理杂志

At present, we are fighting against the outbreak of novel coronavirus pneumonia (NCP) in China. For the purposes of diagnosis and treatment of NCP patients, Hangzhou Xixi Hospital, as a designated hospital, make available the wards quickly, initiated the management system of public health emergencies, and established a tolerate admission- strict discharge patients management program. Meanwhile, the hospital has established an emergency supply and coordinated distribution mechanism for medical protection materials, and a full-system and multi-model training system, ensuring smooth progress of the diagnosis and treatment work. Key words: Novel coronavirus pneumonia; Designated hospital; Emergency management; Patient follow-up

Disaster-Resistant Community: An examination of developmental differences

Flood disaster-resistant community projects, which are viewed as a non-infrastructure disaster management strategy, have been implemented to encourage residents to participate in community-based disaster management programs in Taiwan. Although this strategy provides many benefits in principle, there is no agreement on what it develops, and its practice varies. In this paper, first, the concept of a disaster-resistant community is refined, building two definitional dimensions: resources and consensus-based emergency management. Based on these dimensions, the current development of a disaster-resistant community is introduced and distinguished from other categories: passive dependency, resource utilization, proactive preparedness, and comprehensive integrated plan. The main characteristics of each category are provided. The model of a disaster-resistant community enables community practitioners and public managers to assess their relative perspectives to bottom-up emergency management approaches, and the model provides considerable information to stakeholders. The disaster-resistant community matrix can notify ongoing theory building and practical experimentation to fill the current literature gap, refine the indicators of emergency management practice, and provide suggestions for voluntary participation in the community-based emergency management process.

Construction of Emergency Dispatching System under the Background of Smart City with Big Data

With the continuous development of global technology, the number of smart cities is also increasing. The development of these cities is also accompanied by constant emergencies. Big data technology provides us with a way to optimize the city’s emergency dispatch system. In the context of smart city, it has become a trend to combine big data technology to construct emergency dispatching system. The key points of this article are the interrelation of emergency call areas and coordinated dispatch between smart cities. This paper studies possible games between different cities and proposes optimization methods. According to the processing process of material demand information flow, an emergency dispatching system framework of four parts, namely the requirements layer, the information layer, the session layer and the send layer, is constructed to provide reference for the practice of emergency management.

Nursing emergency management practice of COVID-19 in a traditional Chinese medicine hospital

Nursing work is an integral part of hospital work. Under the challenge of the COVID-19 epidemic, it is particularly important to establish a timely and efficient nursing management system. The nursing department of our hospital used the theory and method of feedforward control to formulate the emergency plan for epidemic prevention and control and to conduct drills. The plan includes the establishment of the emergency management system for epidemic nursing and key prevention and control positions, rational allocation of human resources, and strengthening personnel training, so as to ensure the efficient operation of nursing epidemic prevention and control work and provide a reference for nursing management mode during the epidemic.

Evolution of the Public Health Preparedness and Response Capability Standards to Support Public Health Emergency Management Practices and Processes.

In spring 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released Public Health Preparedness Capabilities: National Standards for State and Local Planning. The capability standards provide a framework that supports state, local, tribal, and territorial public health agency preparedness planning and response to public health threats and emergencies. In 2017, a project team at the CDC Division of State and Local Readiness incorporated input from subject matter experts, national partners, and stakeholders to update the 2011 capability standards. As a result, CDC released the updated capability standards in October 2018, which were amended in January 2019. The original structure of the 15 capability standards remained unchanged, but updates were made to capability functions, tasks, and resource elements to reflect advances in public health emergency preparedness and response practices since 2011. When the number of functions and tasks in the 2018 capability standards were compared to those in the 2011 capabilities, only 20% (3/15) of the capabilities had a decrease in function number. The majority of changes were at the task level (task numbers changed in 80%, or 12/15, capabilities) in the 2018 version. The capability standards provide public health agencies with a practical framework, informed by updated science and tools, which can guide prioritization of limited resources to strengthen public health agency emergency preparedness and response capacities.

An Investigation of Athletic Trainers’ Emergency Management Practices for Equipment-Intensive Sports

In 2015, new practice recommendations to remove equipment prior to transport when cervical spine injury is suspected were released. The purpose of this study was to determine current emergency management practices and perceptions of the new practice recommendation. We received completed mixed-method surveys from 143 athletic trainers practicing in the Mid-Atlantic region (response rate = 10.11%). The majority of respondents stated that the number of personnel required, along with the training and time to practice equipment removal, were barriers to implementation. Requiring assistance from emergency medical services (EMS) was common, but many failed to practice with local EMS. Emergency management procedures should be appropriate given the resources (personnel and training) available. Collaboration between athletic trainers and EMS is needed.

Improving emergency evacuation planning with mobile phone location data

Timely responses to emergencies are critical for urban disaster and emergency management, particularly in densely populated mega-cities. Researchers and personnel involved in urban emergency management nowadays rely on computers to carry out complex evacuation planning. Agent-based modeling, which supports the representation of interactions among individuals and between individuals and their environments, has become a major approach to simulating evacuations wherein spatial–temporal dynamics and individual conditions need attention, such as congestion in urban areas. However, the development of optimal evacuation plans based upon agent-based evacuation simulations can be very time-consuming. In this study, to shorten the computation time to provide a timely response in an efficient way, we develop a knowledge database to store evacuation plans for typical population distributions generated by mobile phone location data. Subsequently, we use the prepared knowledge database (offline) to accelerate real-time (online) processes in searching for near-optimal evacuation plans. Our experimental result demonstrates that the evacuation plans generated with a knowledge database always outperform those that are generated without a knowledge database. Specifically, the knowledge database can reduce the computation time by an average of 96.76%, with an average fitness value improvement of 21.86%. This result confirms the effectiveness of our proposed approach in improving agent-based evacuation planning. With the rapid development of human sensor data collection and analysis, the estimation of a more accurate population distribution will become easier in future. Thus, we believe that the proposed approach of developing a knowledge database based on population distribution patterns will provide a more feasible alternative solution for evacuation planning in the practice of urban emergency management.

Industry 4.0: revolution or hype? Reassessing recent technological trends and their impact on labour

The aim of this paper is to reassess the current view of technological trends adopting a historical perspective. In our interpretation, the historical record provides some suggestive evidence for a more sceptical view of the notion of an emerging “fourth” industrial revolution. Indeed, even at an impressionistic glance, the recent developments in AI, communication and robotics that are marked as the core of the fourth industrial revolution, appear as a rather natural prolongation of the ICT macro-trajectories described in this paper. At the same time, to study the relation between technology and labour, we focus on the plant level as the most useful unit of analysis to consider the complex interaction between management systems, labour process and technological innovations. In this sense, we examine two Internet of Things’ technologies in order to underline the persistence of a fundamental trait of the capitalist mode of production, namely the exertion of control over workers. Consistently, we expect a continuity between newly emerging management practices and previous management systems, especially referring to the ones adopted during the ICT revolution.

An integrated web framework for HAZUS-MH flood loss estimation analysis

Flood emergency management practices cover various aspects of flooding, such as demography, infrastructure, economy, transportation, and agriculture. Emergency managers and local authorities work to understand existing and potential impacts of flooding in their communities. HAZUS is one of the most widely used GIS-based desktop software packages designed to help emergency managers to simulate floods and observe their possible effects in their communities. Using HAZUS, emergency managers can prioritize regions to receive help, allocate resources, and plan mitigation measures in the disaster area. However, the system has limitations in terms of its technical requirements, the number of flood scenarios and data options, accessibility, and performance. In this study, we present an integrated and scalable web framework for HAZUS-MH flood loss estimation analysis. By taking advantage of the Iowa Flood Center’s extensive flood inundation map repository for Iowa, we could enable interactive analysis between flood map raster and census data to demonstrate flooding impacts in Iowa communities. High-resolution pre-computed flood inundation maps allowed us to execute damage and loss analyses within seconds. Using visualization techniques on the web, users can access damage and loss analysis without specific software or technical expertise. Moreover, by connecting new data sources, we also enabled many different analyses through the web-based system, including agricultural damage and loss analysis and flooded transportation segments. The generalized architecture of the system allows the framework to analyze any region and community.

Commentary on Burke's Article on ‘Challenging Fallacies of the Military Model’ in the Disaster Research and Emergency Management Practice

While the debate continues between the emergency managers and disaster research community on the applicability of the Incident Command System (ICS), Burke (2018) introduces the modern military command and control system (modern military C2) as a practical solution that satisfies the disaster researchers’ recommendations. Burke's (2018) argument concludes that both practitioners and researchers overlook the essences of the military command and control system, which can be considered an analogous model to the problem-solving approach. This commentary paper is a critical review of the Burke's (2018) perspective. It highlights how and why modern military C2 differs from the problem-solving approach. There is more similarity between modern military C2 and ICS than between them and the problem-solving approach due to their structures and the flexibility level adopted therein.

Uncovering the Real Recovery Challenge: What Emergency Management Must Do

Abstract Despite decades of genuine experience derived from major disasters, emergency exercises and expert reviews of crisis events in reports and after action summaries it seems we know far less about post disaster restoration and recovery than we should. This shortfall presents several challenges to public policy, governance and the practice of emergency management as the specific steps, requirements, connections, issues and interdependencies in resurrecting a severely damaged city goes far beyond cleanup and routine debris removal tasks. Approaches towards restoration and recovery differ between the USA and the UK but there is equal regard for deriving as much insight as possible from post disaster imperatives by deliberately exercising what is seldom examined – the raw details and demands of city and community recovery. One suggested avenue is to expand future emergency exercises by focusing on how better to understand and execute the variety of restoration and recovery activies needed and devote less energy to traditional emergency response measures. This would invite testing emergency management leaders and experts with demanding 'maximum of maximum' scenarios to analyze the depth, challenges and complexity involved.

People-oriented emergency response mechanism—An example of the emergency work when typhoon Meranti stroked Xiamen

China is a country with frequent meteorological disasters. At the same time, it is also a big country with population of more than one billion. In 2006, the Chinese government adopted the people-oriented emergency response mechanism (POERM), which has successfully reduced mortality. How does China quickly transform an idea into an emergency management practice? In 2016, Xiamen initiated the POERM, which successfully reduced the losses caused by the super typhoon Meranti. Taking this disaster incident as an example, this paper analyzes the operation process of POERM from three aspects: laws and regulations, emergency management networks and supervision mechanisms. The laws and regulations are designed to guide people-centered behavior; the emergency management network is designed to achieve functions of the POERM; the supervisory mechanism is responsible for ensuring the efficiency and quality of the emergency response mechanism. We found that the central government successfully passed the pressure to local governments through the POERM. Moreover, it has promoted the ability of local government departments to improve communication and innovation, and to improve the organization's ability to respond to disasters. At the same time, we also found that in the process of disaster response, local governments have greater pressure to reduce disaster losses. Local governments have been fighting for early warnings to get more time to reduce losses, but they have also increased risk mitigation costs.