Wanganui DHB held a trial run on their proposed WebEOC education package on Wednesday (4th February) afternoon. Attending were a mixture of staff who had attended the initial super user training in 2008 and some who were being exposed to WebEOC for the first time.
The aim of the training was to run through the programme developed by Dr Praveen Thadigiri before rolling it out to staff within the Wanganui DHB. The content had a quick overview on emergency management then moved into the commonly accessed boards and plug ins. The creation of position logs and tasks to completing sitreps and the use of Emergeo were all covered in a simple and easy to understand way. Students were encouraged to enter details in the various boards in a training event scenario that had been set specifically by Charles for the Wanganui DHB.
It is hoped that the education package can be rolled out to introduce WebEOC to not only those filling positions within the EOC but PA, EA's and those who are likely to be used to capture and enter data during an event.
For any further information contact Charles, Glenys Fitzpatrick at the Wanganui DHB or myself.
Murray Mills
Central Regional Emergency Management Advisor
MoH
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Changing the size of the text
I've finally worked out why the size of text in the control panel or boards appears to vary according to the day of the week! Simply click on the window you want to alter the text in and hold 'Ctrl' whilst scrolling the mouse wheel. This will either increase or decrease the size of the text and is a great way to increase the readability of the boards.
Extra fields added to position log
Following feedback from the SuperUser training and discussion at the EMIS Reference Group two additional fields have been added to the generic position log. The priority fields allow users to indicate a Flash, High, Medium or Low priority, whilst the Accuracy field allows them to indicate the level of faith in the data. For example information received from an emergency service or a member of staff on the ground may be rated highly, whilst anecdotal reports may be rated quite low unless corroborating reports are received.
These fields appear above the description in the display view and you can see here two medium priority entries highlighted yellow.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Mahia fire
Central Region Ambulance used WebEOC to monitor the affects of the scrub fire on Mahia Beach that destroyed 8 buildings and required a number of evacuations.
St John did a great job, logging onto the generic incident and adding details whilst against the 'Central Region Ambulance Incident' until the name was changed by the administrator to Mahia Beach Fire. The administrator could also have added any other agencies to that incident or grouped multiple incidents into a master view at that point.
St John used it as a training oppourtunity to familiarise their on-call senior officers with WebEOC. Although the fire was contained and they stood down monitoring it late last night it meant that all the details were there had it been required for a wider evacuation - in 2007 San Diego County used WebEOC to manage the evacuation of over 500,000 people and the response to some huge bush fires over a period of three weeks.
Over the rest of the summer there are a range of pre-planned public events where I'll be working with Ambulance and DHBs to have WebEOC running in the background, pre-populated with incident details just in case anything goes wrong.
St John did a great job, logging onto the generic incident and adding details whilst against the 'Central Region Ambulance Incident' until the name was changed by the administrator to Mahia Beach Fire. The administrator could also have added any other agencies to that incident or grouped multiple incidents into a master view at that point.
St John used it as a training oppourtunity to familiarise their on-call senior officers with WebEOC. Although the fire was contained and they stood down monitoring it late last night it meant that all the details were there had it been required for a wider evacuation - in 2007 San Diego County used WebEOC to manage the evacuation of over 500,000 people and the response to some huge bush fires over a period of three weeks.
Over the rest of the summer there are a range of pre-planned public events where I'll be working with Ambulance and DHBs to have WebEOC running in the background, pre-populated with incident details just in case anything goes wrong.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Website Pulse
I trialled a great subscription service whilst I was out of the office over the Christmas holidays called Website pulse. This lets you set up virtually any number of different SMS or email alert notifications in the event that a website that you have 'targeted' becomes unavailable.
The system lets you specify how often it 'pings' a target website and you can set it to increase the frequency of pings if a website has gone down. It also provides notification when a website is restored as well as daily logs and reports of duration outage.
Pricing is based on a number of factors such as how many sites you monitor and how often you are text once a fault is detected but best of all it gives you a months free trial. One of their support team even called me to make sure I had set it up as I wanted and didn't have any questions.
Whilst I'm sure there are other systems out there websitepulse seemed to do what it says on the tin and would be worth thinking about if you have a role that relies on access to web-based services or sites.
The system lets you specify how often it 'pings' a target website and you can set it to increase the frequency of pings if a website has gone down. It also provides notification when a website is restored as well as daily logs and reports of duration outage.
Pricing is based on a number of factors such as how many sites you monitor and how often you are text once a fault is detected but best of all it gives you a months free trial. One of their support team even called me to make sure I had set it up as I wanted and didn't have any questions.
Whilst I'm sure there are other systems out there websitepulse seemed to do what it says on the tin and would be worth thinking about if you have a role that relies on access to web-based services or sites.
Conficker worm and business continuity
The last week has illustrated some challenges around business continuity and corporate networks and the increasing need for emergency managers to be familiar with the basics of their organisations IT services
The Ministry of Health has been dealing with the Conficker worm that is now spreading rapidly across the world and is estimated to have affected over 6.5million windows computers in the last 4 days. Whilst things are coming back to normal, some of the control measures such as shutting down web based services in and out of the Ministry has obviously had a significant impact.
With delays last year around implementing the mirrored fallback site for the emergency management information system, the production server had to be taken down and we informed the sector and put in place other arrangements to manage an emergency until the production server was restored.
Restrictions continue on internet access, so as well as delays in updating this blog, we have had to think about access to computers outside the corporate environment so that we can access data on sites such as the World Health Organisation.
With the outbreak affecting more and more PC's now is the time to buy your friend in the IT department another coffee, confirm everything is up to date and think about how you would be able to maintain your critical communication links, inform your public and stakeholders and prioritise your system restoration.
Finally a big thanks to everyone who has worked so hard in the information directorate, especially those I always seem to talk to in desktop support and the application & server team for getting production restored so quickly.
The Ministry of Health has been dealing with the Conficker worm that is now spreading rapidly across the world and is estimated to have affected over 6.5million windows computers in the last 4 days. Whilst things are coming back to normal, some of the control measures such as shutting down web based services in and out of the Ministry has obviously had a significant impact.
With delays last year around implementing the mirrored fallback site for the emergency management information system, the production server had to be taken down and we informed the sector and put in place other arrangements to manage an emergency until the production server was restored.
Restrictions continue on internet access, so as well as delays in updating this blog, we have had to think about access to computers outside the corporate environment so that we can access data on sites such as the World Health Organisation.
With the outbreak affecting more and more PC's now is the time to buy your friend in the IT department another coffee, confirm everything is up to date and think about how you would be able to maintain your critical communication links, inform your public and stakeholders and prioritise your system restoration.
Finally a big thanks to everyone who has worked so hard in the information directorate, especially those I always seem to talk to in desktop support and the application & server team for getting production restored so quickly.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
New Link shows all WebEOC users logged in
Jeremy has created a great function in response to the requests in Superuser training sessions to see who is logged in.Simply click on WebEOC Session List under the Links menu to open a webpage showing Users and which Incident they are logged into (Remember Position is used to record the short code for your agency, Username is actually the generic CIMS position in your EOC).
It also shows any additional log-in information that they have entered, this is why it is important to add your own name and details on that log-in page. It is also good practice to log-off when you change shift so that the next user can update their details.
The Session List can also be viewed without having to log into WebEOC. Simply view http://moheoc.moh.govt.nz/sessionlist/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
