Disaster Management
This domain tests the disaster lifecycle beyond a single facility emergency: mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery, with community coordination and mass casualty management.
Core rules
- Distinguish an emergency from a disaster: a disaster overwhelms local resources and requires external assistance.
- Use incident command/ICS and, in the U.S., emergency support functions (ESFs) to organize resources. Healthcare coordinates with public health, EMS, fire, law enforcement, and emergency management.
- Plan mass casualty triage using a recognized method (e.g., START or SALT) and practice dynamic re-triage.
- Manage surge through bed expansion, staffing strategies, caching, and mutual aid agreements.
- Communicate with redundant systems and plain language; include accessible messaging for at-risk populations.
- Plan recovery early: infrastructure restoration, staff resilience, financial tracking, and after-action improvement.
Worked example
A tornado damages a hospital, cutting power and water. Activate the EOP and ICS, assess structural safety, switch to generators, conserve water, shelter or evacuate by priority, track patients, request mutual aid, and begin recovery documentation. The reasoning: disaster response requires prioritized scarce-resource decisions and external coordination, not routine operations.
Traps
- Treating disaster planning as only response; skipping mitigation and recovery.
- Using triage tags without training or re-triage.
- No mutual aid or resource request process.
- Failing to integrate community partners and at-risk populations.
- Ending the exercise at demobilization without recovery or corrective actions.