New Incident Action Plan board

Last year ESI (The WebEOC developers) released a great set of boards that mirrored the Incident Action Plans within the US National Incident Management System (NIMS). These boards replicated the processes within NIMS ICS forms 202-207 and as a result unfortunately used terminology and description largely unfamiliar to NZ.

In New Zealand we aren't as specific around a national form series and with the exception of a one page IAP template within the Coordinated Incident Management System blue book have no standardised system. Jeremy and I have therefore spent the last couple of months adapting the ESI ICS forms for the New Zealand Health sector. Now the chances are unless you have worked in emergency management in the US or completed some of the on-line NIMS training you are not going to know what an ICS 202 does that an ICS 205 doesn't, so there was quite a lot of work involved in relabelling all of the board links and field descriptions from a number system to a descriptive system. Thus ICS 203 became ' Incident Objectives'. This relabelling was done all the way through the board code as well simply on the displayed pages so that any administrator editing the boards in the future would not encounter a mix of descriptions.

This IAP boards is available under a menu option. Staff can either be given access to the IAP - Input menu or the IAP view only menu. The display view work in exactly the same way as the sitrep board showing either all or the most recent IAPs. Initially Incident Controllers, EOC Managers, Operations and Planning and Intelligence staff will be given access to the input view. The most important thing to remember is that only one user can be editing a draft IAP at a time, this is exactly the same as the process for sitreps.

The completed IAP consists of a number of display views comprising the:

• coversheet - detailing the incident, operational period, time of completion and key roles
• objectives - allowing a number of objectives to be recorded as well as weather forecast and safety messages
• assignment list - allowing you to record your CIMS structure. It also allows additional units and teams to be created within the Operations section and to record resources assigned to them
• communications plan
• medical plan - allowing detailed planning to be undertaken for pre-planned operations Organisation chart.

Each display view can be edited or printed individually allowing you to distribute multiple copies of the communications plan or assignment list. The IAP in its entirity can also be easily and neatly printed to PDF.

As you can imagine having re-labelled and remapped a 1000 odd fields there may be a couple we have missed and we are also having a few teething problems using the board with Master Views. We'll hopefully find and address these issues over the next couple of weeks and will be testing the IAP forms in Ex Paradise (the South Island CDEM exercise) and during the Battle of The Streets in Paeroa this weekend.