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.

Wanganui DHB trials WebEOC education plan

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

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.

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.