Disaster Preparedness and Planning
The planning cycle
Disaster preparedness rests on a continuous cycle: mitigation → preparedness → response → recovery, with after-action review feeding back into revised plans. Candidates must distinguish the four phases and know which activities belong to each. A common trap is labeling a hazard-mitigation grant (e.g., seismic retrofitting) as "preparedness"; mitigation reduces or eliminates long-term risk, while preparedness builds response capability.
Core plan components
Know the elements of a hospital or jurisdictional emergency operations plan (EOP): hazard vulnerability analysis (HVA), concept of operations (ConOps), roles and responsibilities, communication systems, resource and mutual-aid arrangements, evacuation and shelter-in-place triggers, surge capacity, and training/exercise requirements. Plans should be all-hazards and scalable, written to the Emergency Management Accreditation Program and Joint Commission expectations (annual review, two exercises per year, one involving community partners).
Exercises
Understand the exercise progression: seminar → workshop → tabletop → drill → functional → full-scale. Each builds on the prior. Questions often test which exercise type validates a specific capability-functional exercises test command and communications without moving patients; full-scale exercises deploy resources and patients in the field.
Rule of thumb
A plan is only as good as its tested assumptions: if a capability has never been exercised with the partners who must deliver it, treat it as unverified.
Worked example: A hospital's HVA ranks a nearby chemical plant as high risk. The correct preparedness action is not merely stockpiling antidotes (a response resource) but writing a decontamination annex, training staff, and exercising with the plant and EMS-linking risk identification to tested capability.