Influenza A (H1N1) response

Last Saturday afternoon I got a call from my boss that he was on the way back from the coast and could I meet him at work to discuss a possible national response to passengers that had returned that day from Mexico.

I got in about 20 mins before him and in that time grabbed the first 'ready box' containing a couple of laptops and a couple of phones out of the National Health Coordination Centre (NHCC) 'armoury' and had them and the Smart board up and running in time for when he got in.

Things started a little slowly but rapidly started to escalate as we made contact with Auckland Regional Public Health Service who were undertaking the contact tracing of passengers off the flight that had arrived from Los Angeles that morning.

After a late finish I mountain biked in the next day for a 0930 start and that was the last I saw of my bike until i stuck it on the back of the car on Friday night. By midday we had another 6 positions established within the Ministry's executive board room giving us a Cooridinated Incident Management System (the NZ equivalent to ICS) with a couple of seperate briefing rooms on the side. This room had been identified previously and we fortunate to have 3 ceiling mounted projectors that we used t display EOC and National Sig Events.

Monday brought a welcome surge of additional staff back to Wellington but the fact that NZ is one of the the first countries in the world to wake up every day meant that we had a very high operational tempo from day one responding to developments in Europe and the US that had occured during the night whilst Australia and Asia would start to contact us for updates just as we were hoping things may be slowing down for the day!

Monday afternoon it was decided to relocate the NHCC to a much larger suite of meeting rooms. We had some great support from Information Directorate who established the new NHCC whilst we continued to work upstairs meaning that the last thing we had to do on Monday night was slide the projectors from their ceiling mounts and relocate them and the laptops we had been using down to the second floor. The room we had been working in then became the media briefing room for a series of press conferences including regular joint video media conferences with the Incident Controller in Auckland - a first for NZ I think.

Since the Tuesday the NHCC has been running at a very high intensity in support of operations across the health sector. This has been the first time the sector has operated in Code Yellow, a preparatory state and we are fortunate in having an internationally regarded NZ Influenza Pandemic Action Plan to guide some of our key decisions as well as having reviewed the generic National Health Emergency Plan in th last few months.

The NHCC, like many of the local District Health Board and Public Health Units across the country has been operational for on average 16 hours a day this week, with most staff covering two shifts from 0700-1900 and a number of us covering the hours outside of this as well.

WebEOC has worked extremely well but of course a number of challenges and issues have been raised and will of course be addressed in due course.

The National Sig Event board and the Incident Details board have proven to be an extremely effective way of rapidly disseminating key information to the sector in a matter of seconds. The Incident Details board has been adapted to reflect the key information around the response that we wanted to capture and now functions as a one-stop shop for information such as the latest case definitions, border status or national stockpile.

ESI have provided details of a WebFusion server that will allow any jurisdiction around the world to share relevant data on Influenza A (H1N1) and I've got a teleconference with their health users and international customers VP on Monday to discuss the range of data they are trying to pull together.

We have also provided read only or limited access to a large number of government department and a few companies that we have been working closely with and have been supported superbly by Jeremy and Ian who have been working non-stop to address minor tweaks and improvements as well as building a number of new boards to record summary details of case management and other areas.

We still need to work on the business process to better intergrate WebEOC with agencies single point of contact emails. One of the attractions of WebEOC was that it gave the Health Sector a resilient seperate system in the event that any agency looses their corporate email however for events like this in the future we need to ensure we can operate WebEOC alongside business as usual emails without double handling information.

I'll be making contact with some of the multi-national WebEOC corporate users through the ESI forums to review how they intergrate the two systems together.

I also think there is an opportunity to better utilise the database elements of WebEOC by developing interfaces with other systems, whether these are mobilising, patient management systems or epidemiological surveillance. The challenge is to keep WebEOC at the appropriate strategic level, rather than micromanaging the response.

It's too early to say what will happen with Non Seasonal Influenza A but I'm hopeful the EMIS reference group meeting and training will still go ahead towards the end of May. This ongoing incident has certainly provided a robust test of the system.

I'd just like to thank everyone I've worked with over the last week, especially the support we've received in our EOC from other agencies and I'll see you again on my next shift. By then the National Coordinator will have probably worked out that I can still work on WebEOC from home and will have got Jeremy to suspend my account.

I'd also like to recognise all of the work out in the sector, especially the emergency management staff who will be working hard to bring together a range of diverse staff groups to manage the incident.

If any WebEOC administrators need any support or assistance in your jurisdictions with managing this feel free to drop me a line. I'm grateful to the support of Eric Epley at South Texas Regional Advisory Centre for trauma and Phil at WA Police, both WebEOC innovators over the last 4 years, whom I was able to bounce some ideas off over the last few days.

Board Building Boot Camp 27 & 28 May

Following the EMIS reference Group meeting another two day board building boot camp will be held in Wellington for would-be WebEOC administrators.

The first day provides an opportunity for those with no programming experience to be trained in the basic WebEOC administrator support functions, allowing you to create new incidents, modify board permissions or add additional images to Map Tac.

This day runs in parallel to the 2 day board building camp. This is aimed at those in the sector with some experience of software development or coding and an existing knowledge of html. The first half day is spent learning the WebEOC specific html tags and the administrative functions that support board development before being let loose on the training & development server.

The intention is that those attending will have identified with their agency a requirement for a local board and will be able to have completed this board by the end of the two days with a view to moving it into production once it is performing as expected.

This event ran really well last November and this year we have made a number of spaces available to other agencies that use WebEOC, hoping to build a critical mass of grass roots level board developers and knowledge of WebEOC so that agencies can lever off each others efforts even in other sectors.

I'd love to see those who attended the November course back as well as it is a great opportunity to build some boards away from the distraction of the office and with the on-site support of Jeremy and Ian, Australasia's own WebEOC board-wizards.

If anyone is interested in attending please get in contact.

EMIS Reference Group meeting 26 May

The EMIS Reference Group will meet on the 26 May in Wellington for its 6 monthly meeting. The Group is made up of 12 agencies representing between them the four health regions as well as specific DHB, PHUs, Ambulance and Emergency Ambulance Communications Centre area of WebEOC use.

It has been an extremely busy 6 months for EMIS, with St John in particular working with a number of DHBs and EACC to use WebEOC for pre-planned events during the summer and a significant of work going on behind the scenes on the GIS front that Jeremy and I will be presenting to the group.

Issues raised at the reference group will be fed back to the sector through the various representatives at the quarterly regional emergency management meetings.

Martime NZ Oil Spill Exercise

Over the days of the 6th and 7th of April Maritime NZ held a exercise down in Dunedin to fully test their WebEOC system. Or as it is described in Martime, the IMS (Information/Incident Management System). Luckily i was able to attend and be involved within the incident as part of the IMS support along with Dave Russell from MNZ's IT team. The exercise was based upon a oil spill in the Otago harbour, and how the team was to respond/manage the whole incident from start to finish. The incident started of with a collision between a ship and a tug on passage while exiting the harbour. Resulting in several tonnes of oil spilling into the harbour. The NRT (National Response Team) was quickly dispatched to help Otago Regional Council deal with the spill. The exercise seemed to run very well, with a lot of work, energy and enthusiasim put in from many people from MNZ and Otago Regional Council. WebEOC was tested well within the NCC (National Communication Centre), out in the field from the Port Chalmers Yacht Club and back at the Wellington office from the DAT team, with minimal problems. People were able to add information to the main Log, compile IAP's, Add/Respond to tasks, Compile sitreps, Add Media Releases, Deploy equipment, Assign personnel, Add Vessell details, track oil release vs recovery, track costs and much more. Below are some action short from the NCC and the Field.
The Operations Team conversing very well
Admin and Logistics team hard at work
Wildlife Team
Planning Team
The NOSC Team, along with Neil Rowath floating in the background planning the next event within the exercise
The Health and Safety Team. - Thank you to Lynne Irving for providing the photo's
The IMS support team, concentraiting hard! :0)
MNZ staff out in the field preping themselves and the equipment
The MNZ cleanup boat used in the exercise
The Dunedin Harbour everyone was working hard to save!

Position Logging and Tasking in the running for Board of the Year

The Position Logging and Tasking boards have been submitted by ESI to the WebEOC community as one of five boards in contention for "Board Designer of the Year".

These boards form the core of our system and allow any users log entry to be raised to a significant event, visible to any agency involved in the response to that incident but the really clever feature is the work that Jeremy undertook after Ex Ruaumoko when the feedback was that any agency wanted to be able to send and track a task to any other agency. These tasks can be generated from anybodies log entry and then assigner to any combination of internal and external users. This allows your operations and planning teams to be aware of resource requests sent to other agencies.

Competition is always tough (especially as Jeremy from Critchlow won the 'Redline' award for pushing the WebEOC boundaries two years ago) and there are some great boards in the other entries, so I recommend you go and have a look at what other agencies have been working on.

I'd like to thank all of the agencies that have provided feedback during exercises, incidents, training and consultation that have provided the direction that this board has developed in, but really thank Jeremy for his work and skill in developing such an innovative solution to the tasking problem.

We can see the GeoNet Server but we can't synchronise the data!

Jeremy and I travelled out to Avalon to catch up with the GeoNet team within GNS to test out their newly configured WFS server.

GeoNet are in a fantastic building that used to be a film studio but seems more like the secret base of a James Bond baddie with some serious computers and data displays on the wall next to racks of climbing gear, electric drills, rock anchors, armoured cabling and satellite dishes - my kind of science! All of that kit is necessary to maintain the network of scientific sensors they have across NZ in some of the harshest alpine terrain under attack from the elements, earthquakes, volcanoes and the ever present Kea (alpine parrot).

The WFS server will in theory serve up a range of data allowing other agencies to point their GIS application at the server and add the data layers into their own system.

Unfortunately whilst we could see the server, and see the data layers available we couldn't get them to synchronise to Emergeo. This photo shows a lot of very clever people trying to work the problem out with little success.

Having emailed the Emergeo Technical Support team in Canada I have a patch to apply to our system as soon as I get a chance and we should be in business.

Other agencies that could benefit from real-time GeoNet data within their GIS system should contact the GeoNet outreach coordinator Sara Tresch.

Operationalising GeoNet

David Johnston hosted a meeting today at GNS Science in Avalon attended by representatives of GNS Science, including GeoNet, Massey University, including researchers from the Joint Centre for Disaster Research Kestrel Group and MCDEM.

The meeting focused on two issues - getting the GeoNet product, primarily the isoseismal maps and realtime shake maps into emergency operations centres to support operational decision making as well as exploring a number of research proposals in the pipeline around conducting NZ Based research into effective EOC decision making informed by scientific advice.

This problem was very well illustrated during Ex Ruaumoko, last year which looked at an increase in activity within the Auckland Volcanic Field and a critical decision point around evacuation. The challenge being an inverse relationship between time available and certainty of eruption.

Interoperability and appropriate standards were also discussed with reference to the current MCDEM procurement of an emergency management information system and the need to ensure a common operating picture can be shared across all agencies.

Thanks to David and Sara at GNS for hosting and organising this meeting and hopefully the work this week with GeoNet will establish a real time WFS server feed to Emergeo that other agencies can utilise as well.