School Closure Board

Last month it became evident that a number of schools may need to be closed either entirely or selectively (individual classes/year groups) as part of a strategy to manage confirmed cases of Novel H1N1 (Swine Flu). Whilst this obviously has a large community impact on families that need to look after pupils sent home it is an effective public health intervention as part of the cluster control 'Stamp It Out' strategy.

Whilst the closure or partial closure of a school is a local decision within the National Health Coordination Centre we need to have an overview of the number of closures across the country so as to inform the current strategy, the Minister, media and the public.

This is exactly the kind of quantitative emergency management data that WebEOC excels at so with Jeremy busy finalising the public website showing Community Based Assessment Centres (aka Flu Clinics) I rolled my sleeves up and started board building - something I haven't done since lastDecember.

3 hours later, a couple of flat white coffees and a lot of html copying and pasting I'd managed to rip the guts out of the standard ESI Shelters Board and reconfigure it to record school closures.


There are a couple of neat features with this board. Firstly there are two sets of display views; every Planning & Intelligence, Operations and Incident Controller have access to the edit views and can input new schools whilst every other user can view school closures. This allows the range of Civil Defence Emergency Management users and the Ministry of Education to view definitive data that has been entered by the relevant Public Health Unit or District Health Board.

Another neat feature is a filter that works on the re-opening date and allows you filter on 'Current Closures' or 'all historical closures'.

Every address can also be geo-coded. This uses our Emergeo GIS Plug-in and we currently reference the GeoStan address database. At the moment this is just returning the Lat and Long for the school but we are working on the a direct link to the WebEOC server to allow these lat and longs to be used directly to overlay school closures on the current case maps.

We kept this board fairly simple and it works really well. Some neat enhancements would be auto-populating the District Health Board and Public Health Unit name from either the address once it is geocoded or from the username creating the entry. You could also enhance it with a drop down list for the type of school, but I have found with these things you tend to end up missing categories and there are always exceptions out there, especially with a national system.

Whilst we have had a couple of work place closures in response to Novel H1N1 these have not yet been widespread and we have not developed a WebEOC board to track them. I'd be interested to hear from Emergency Managers and WebEOC administrators on what they think the best option would be. It would be easiest to simply build a new board, perhaps by business type to track workplace closures, whilst a more sophisticated option would be to turn this board into a generic closures board an incorporate a list drop down for school, business, public utility etc. That has the advantage of keeping everything in one place but does complicate the board design. Thoughts?