Incident Command
Decision Workshop
We sometimes nickname this course "Who can we save?".
In a major quake during daytime hours, your site may well have more people
trapped and injured than it can potentially respond to before it's too late. How would you choose which person(s) received
rescue assistance first, if you knew that meant someone else's chances of survival and complete recovery would be reduced?
This course is NOT about medical triage. It's about the critical mental
decisions and choices that precede even getting a victim medically triaged.
The traditional Incident Command System (or more currently NIMS) courses
provide flow charts and other useful information, and are effective organizational models.
Nevertheless, a teacher, corporate executive or residential care facility
administrator is NOT a professional emergency manager, and may be quite unprepared to have life and death decisions rest on
their shoulders at all, let alone when time is critical.
This course is designed to bridge the gap between model concepts and actually dealing
with the nitty-gritty, life and death decisions a layperson may be called on to make under tremendous stress and time
pressure.
You will be briefly introduced to basic ICS concepts and flow charts, and
move rapidly into learning site-based rapid assessment techniques. But that is only the "milk".
The "meat" comes as you work through custom-designed table-top simulations
in small groups. As each group reports out, and the debriefing progresses, you will begin to understand disaster
management in a whole new way.
Will your decisions meet the best available moral and legal guidelines?
Could you defend yourself successfully in post-disaster litigation? Could you ever sleep again?
While no one can ensure that you will be able to answer these last questions
in the positive, if you don't start with a course of this nature, you will likely be completely overwhelmed in a real disaster.
Every decision has consequences. This course will give you some guidelines
and a yardstick that may help you through some of the potentially most trying moments of your career.
This course is customized to your site and operations. A preliminary
assessment is a pre-requisite to this course, and must be completed at least one month prior to scheduling. The client
must also work with me well prior to the workshop to produce specialty site maps. The course time varies, but should
be a minimum length of three hours.
