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Coordinating: Assessment Basics

When assessing risks and needs, consider the following:

Identify where you are now and where you want to be
Be realistic—consider likely risks in your area
Use past experiences—what was successful and unsuccessful
Build a more encompassing vision by leveraging resources
Track your assessment process as you refine it
Locate and review existing assessment tools

Identifying Start and End Points

To plan effectively, you first need to know your start and end points and should have some idea of the terrain between them. How you will get there is part of planning and strategy.

At its simplest, assessment is identifying:

Where you want to be
Where you are now in relation to this goal
The distance between where you are and where you want to be

Being Realistic

When discussing your goals, it is essential to be realistic. Disasters and emergencies are inevitable. Assessment consists of facing these eventualities and determining how to strive for success during situations that are most likely to overwhelm your community’s response capability.

Considering Likely Local Risks

Your end goals always will be slightly unpredictable since they will occur at some point in the future. When we’re looking at risks, for example, we can predict the likelihood of certain things happening in our localities—earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, fires, drought, or other public health threats—but we can never know for sure. Nonetheless, when considering local risks and needs, in effect, we are saying, “If this happens at some point in the future, this is how we want to prevent or lessen the damage and harm in our community.”

Using Past Experience

Some communities have experienced particular natural disasters or other public health problems. These communities are vulnerable in certain ways, and to be ready for such eventualities, certain predictable measures are necessary. Based on where you are today and where you would like to be tomorrow, as a community, you will have completed the simplest form of an assessment.

For example, an influenza epidemic may have struck your local nursing homes. During this event, readily available medical supplies may have been lacking, and this deficit may have interfered with response measures. You also may know that no preventative measures have been taken since the event to resolve the problem. Identifying these conditions means that you identified your start and end points—it is a simple assessment. Your local planning effort will determine how to close the gap between current and more ideal conditions.

Developing a Broader Vision

Medical and public health preparedness is ongoing, and similar to other forms of safety, there always is an additional measure or precaution to consider. Once you review your local history, remember that there are more concerns than initially considered. You and your response partners will start with the most pressing or likely risks. You will not be able to address all issues at one time. In fact, trying to do so will only overwhelm your capabilities.

Once you determine how to collaborate with your response partners on the most important local concerns or risks, you may find that preventive measures for one potential problem may solve another. Over time, it is possible to develop a broader vision of safety and health for your community, as the investment in building response capabilities can be leveraged to other concerns. You will be able to do more with relatively fewer resources.

Capacity Assessments

Although a community may have material or social vulnerabilities, it also may have capabilities. For example, a health system may not have adequate resources to supply medical staff with diverse language skills in a large-scaled, unanticipated emergency vaccination initiative, leaving non-English speaking segments of the population vulnerable.

However, community-based clinics and other organizations serving non-English segments of the community may have interpretation resources that could benefit public health personnel if these interpreters are adequately trained to translate health-related information.

Tracking Your Assessment Process

Once you have developed a procedure for conducting a risk and needs assessment in your community, it is extremely important to record it to avoid duplicating effort. You will want to build on your prior work, which is how more effective assessment procedures are developed. You will want to share your assessment process with other local response partners and with other MRC units.

When soliciting funds for your MRC, describe succinctly how you have examined the medical and public health situation in your community and how you have identified your ideal preparedness and response scenario based on existing capabilities, risks, and needs. In this way, you can argue that your MRC volunteers are not duplicating existing services. Also, you will be able to claim the support of your response partners, who will be confident that the MRC is not infringing on their domains, but simply supplementing their capabilities.

Reviewing Existing Risk Assessments

Your local community may have already conducted a risk assessment as part of its emergency planning process. The results of this assessment may be included in your community’s emergency operations plan or hazard mitigation plan. These plans may describe the risks and hazards most likely to impact your area and any past occurrences of these hazards. In addition, these assessments may describe your vulnerabilities and limitations in addressing these risks and hazards. These plans also may contain assessments of your community’s capacity or capability to respond to risks and hazards.

Hospitals, public health agencies, and other healthcare institutions in your community may have conducted similar assessments of their ability to manage significant public health and medical emergencies. By reviewing these existing risk assessments, you may determine if there are gaps or limitations that can be addressed by your MRC unit.

Locating Existing Assessment Tools

These guidelines have outlined a process for conducting an assessment using minimal resources. There also are some existing standardized assessment instruments that you might use in your area. Some are aimed specifically at hospitals, while others focus on public health situations.

Many of your local response partners—such as hospitals, emergency management agencies, public health departments, etc.—may be using risk and needs assessment tools for their existing emergency planning purposes. These tools may be sufficient for what you need to participate in the planning process and to identify how your MRC volunteers can make a difference.

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Last Updated on 8/18/2006