Wellington Vodafone Homegrown

St John Ambulance used WebEOC during the Wellington Vodafone Homegrown music festival to manage critical events during the day. Whilst the waterfront went off to the likes of Elemeno-P, Supergroove, Shapeshifter and Concord Dawn, St John looked after the medical needs of all the party goers and used the significant event logs and incident details board to maintain a common operating picture of the event.


Pre-planned events like this provide an excellent opportunity for agencies to familiarise themselves with the emergency management information system, and I'd be happy to work with any other agencies to make sure they are prepared to use it for upcoming events this summer.

Shared EOC and Sig Event boards for Ambulance

Two new display boards have been created that allow Ambulance users to view EOC Event data from around the country.

This change was requested because Emergency Ambulance Communications Centre (EACC) was monitoring St John Northern Regions response to the Battle of The Streets last weekend but as everything was going to plan there were very few 'National Sig Events' created and National Sig Events are the EOC log entries which external agencies can see. Now whilst it was clearly a good thing that nothing was 'Nationally Significant' it is often beneficial for agencies to see what is happening routinely . I guess this is human nature, but it also serves to re-assure other agencies that everything is under control and that in fact there are not a whole load of log entries that have been recommended as a "national Sig Event' that the controller has not got around to reviewing and releasing.

We have got around this very quickly by creating 2 new boards; 02a. Ambulance Shared EOC Events and 03a. Ambulance Shared Sig Events. This means that all 10 of the Ambulance regions or structures can view these common logs. Obviously if an emergency occurs at a pre-planned event these logs will quickly grow in size, but at that point agencies should start using the controller reviewing function and posting to the 'National Sig Event' board.

It is important to remember that the Username will indicate the organisation (Ambulance Region) that has posted the entry. but depending on feedback I may add an additional field to the display on these boars to clearly show posting Agency.

I know some agencies in the US have used a slightly different approach whereby they give user access to a 'National Sig Event' board that will filter and show both controller reviewed entries and those awaiting controller review but I think this approach will work equally as well.

At the next meeting of the EMIS reference group we'll discuss whether similar shared Event logs would be useful on a geographical basis for example between groups of District Health Boards (DHBs) in a defined area, or DHBs and their Public Health Units.

Battle of The Streets

On Sunday I managed to get out of the office and work with St John Northern Region who were using WebEOC to manage the prehospital response to the motorcycle street racing in world famous Paeroa. This annual event comprises 20 races on a 1.8km street circuit, with crowds of up to 10,000 separated from the track by mesh fencing and straw bales.

The position logging and Sig Events were used to maintain an overview of activity throughout the day, tracking events such as track opening and closures, pace car laps or incidents in the crowd and on the track.

St John were there to provide an enhanced level of pre-hospital care to competitors and the crowd, ensuring that the towns usual ambulance was avilable for routine calls outside the event, as well as a range of first aid type treatments that you would expect in a ;arge public event. The use of the St John Portacom clinic also enable a large number of patients to be treated on scene, greatly reducing the number of patients that need to be transferred to receiving hospitals.

In addition to St John staff logging data in WebEOC I used the Emergeo Smart Client to plot the course overlay, functional sectors and locations of the Incident Command Point, First Aid, Helicopter Landing Site and other features. The great aspect of Emergeo was of course that not only could the health sector view the data in the browser but we were able to export both layers from the incident to other agencies if required or provide them witha kml file so that they could view it in Google Earth.

During the event photos of key track locations were added to Emergeo and this supplemented photos that had been added from google street view and Internet searches the week before - there is an incredible amount of data that can be added around pre-planned events available during the planning stages.

Waikato and the Auckland DHBs, Ambulance Communication Centre, and Ambulance Midland Region also had access to the incident created before hand so that they could provide support in any Mass Casualty Incident.

The day was a great learning opportunity and increased familiarity around the Emergeo mapping, as well as identifying some refinements to the Incident Action Plan and the need for an Ambulance Event Log, to allow all ambulance regions and comm centre to view a complete event log of entries that have not been raised as sig events.

WebEOC data was added at the Incident Control Point and in an admin area in the St John office (shown). Some great ideas were tested and there will be a number of refinements to the Incident Action Plan as a result, as well as some guidance on how WebEOC can best be used for other pre-planned events.

I'd like to than the District Operations Manager Bruce MacDonald for inviting me up to the event and all of his staff, but especially the event coordinator Hilary Haysom, for looking after me on the day.

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.

Sometimes you need the old systems as well

Whilst I'm quite proud of the Health sectors national EMIS capability we've always recognised that its inherent strength, the ability to rapidly share information across agencies, is of course reliant on internet access. This is a balance of risk; the enhanced information management offered by WebEOC is offset by the risk that internet access may be compromised by the very event we are managing. While a number of agencies are now looking at satellite broadband in order to help ensure resilient connectivity it may still take 12 or 24 hours to get this capability operational in an affected area.

We've therefore developed a standardised self-carbonising message pad that allows users to record position log and task entries in exactly the same way as they would do in WebEOC. These pads produce 4 copies, allowing one each to be assigned to the Position Log, EOC Event Log, EOC Sig Event and Tasking. All pads are uniquely numbered as well as having each data field labelled allowing national sig event or tasks to be accurately communicated between agencies.

Emergency managers in health agencies that have access to EMIS have been sent their agencies allocation of forms.

I've also developed some pre-formatted display boards to record EOC & National Sig Events as well as EOC Status. These are A3 word documents and can be used as a paper based form or enlarged to A0 and laminated as shown below. If anyone would like a copy of these please email me. Used in conjunction with the pads these also provide an excellent visual demonstration of how a EOC event, Sig event or task is visible to all users in an EOC.

WebEOC used to manage US Presidential inauguration

WebEOC was extensively used within the US National Capitol Region (NCR) to manage aspects such as crowd safety, road and air closures and receiving hospitals in order to provide a common operating picture.

Having visited the Washington DC Emergency Operations Centre in my previous career and seen liaison positions for over 30 state and federal law enforcement agencies it is not surprising that they need a common platform in order to undertake this coordination.

Within Auckland we can already do some of this as we are able to easily share data between Auckland City Council's WebEOC and the Health Sector's WebEOC. This means any of the health users in the Region can post significant events straight to a status board in Auckland City CDEM EOC, whilst health users can access boards such as evacuation shelter directly.

However the National Capitol Region went one stage further and deployed a webfusion server that allows many instances of not just webeoc, but other applications such as mobilising or emergency management systems to talk to each other without any complicated API (application program interface) being required.

Rotating Board Display

There is a great new board under the Menus item that I have copied across from the WebEOC users forum.


Called the rotating board display it allows you to specify which board displays you would like to see and for how long. When you press the play button it will then open these boards in new windows and rotate through them in order. This is a neat way of being able to display multip boards on a single projector. You can set it to show the EOC and National Sig Events boards for say 15 seconds each before scrolling to the EOC Status Board for 10 seconds and then the Incident Details board for 20 seconds.


A great board that demonstrates the ability of WebEOC users to lever off other agencies developments around the world. I am also currently working with Jeremy to adapt the US NIMS based Incident Action Planning board for the NZ Health Sector. We hope to have this finished next week.