Auckland CDEM Group ready to support Health Sector with WebEOC

Fred Wilson, who works with Auckland City Council to support their instance of WebEOC has let me have this update on some of the excellent joint planning around response activities that is taking place in the Region. It's really encouraging to see some good operational examples of data exchange and interoperability taking place.

The Auckland CDEM Group, which comprises the Auckland Regional Council and Rodney, North Shore, Waitakere, Auckland City, Manukau, Papakura and Franklin Councils, has completed preparations to provide welfare support in the region should this become necessary.

Using the Auckland City instance of WebEOC, council personnel have been trained to use the system, and supported by the Auckland Region Welfare Advisory Group members (which comprises agencies such as Work & Income, Child Youth and Family, Red Cross, Salvation Army, SPCA, St John, etc.) procedures have been set up to action welfare requests, if this is requested. The current process is that the Northern Region Health Co-ordination Centre (NRHCC) is managing welfare requests associated with consequences of the pandemic in the region, but if the volume becomes unmanageable they may ask for CDEM support.

Preparations include the establishment of a dedicated call centre to take requests for welfare assistance from people referred there from the MoH Healthline. Details will be entered directly into WebEOC, assessed by the Group EOC, and assigned to the various council EOCs as appropriate for action. Where specialist assistance is required, the council will request support from one or more of the welfare agencies. As each request is progressed and action taken, updates entered into WebEOC will be monitored by the Group EOC to detect any areas of over-commitment or delays in responding to requests.

Two short exercises were conducted in early July to test the system and the Auckland CDEM Group region is now ready to provide support if needed.

Using a feature known as Dual Commit, the MoH and Auckland City WebEOC instances can exchange data at the server level. Through this component, the Auckland CDEM personnel can directly access selected non-medical MoH boards such as the National Significant Events and School Closures, and thus easily keep up to date with developments.