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Coordinating: Locating and Upgrading Existing Capabilities

Some of your response partners already may be conducting a local risk and needs assessment, and they may have started articulating a plan to achieve their assessment goals. Therefore, the MRC unit may integrate its volunteers into an existing public health or emergency operations plan.

Nonetheless, as a fully participating partner at the planning table, it will be important for you to understand the basics of such plans to identify where your volunteers might be useful, but also to suggest areas for improving these existing plans.

An MRC utilization plan (or MRC operations plan, handbook, manual, etc.) should:

Describe your risk or vulnerability assessment results. These results will determine the context for everything else to follow.
Describe what is in place before what is needed to achieve the improvements identified in the assessment. Your plan should detail the structure of the current emergency and public health response systems and capabilities in your community and state. These would include all principal participants, resources, and procedures, including plans for medical triage, medical evacuation, backup referrals to other health facilities, alternatives for additional bed capacity, and staffing, quarantine, decontamination measures, and evidence preservation.
Include a description of procedures used during routine, non-emergency periods, including routine methods of sharing information among different functional groups or organizations. Often, routine resource management procedures can help in an emergency provided that all involved are familiar with the procedures.
Detail the organizational structure of your MRC unit, including its chain of command—who reports to whom and who is responsible for which activities. You also may want to include a comprehensive volunteer list and their areas of expertise. Although this may change, it provides an overall picture of what your MRC unit is capable of delivering.
Describe the existing structure to help determine where the system and its capabilities can be supplemented by MRC volunteers. Given differing local needs and capabilities, your unit’s MRC volunteers may be involved in diverse activities, from providing direct care to offering medical support, expert knowledge, and public education. These differences and determining conditions should be detailed in the plan.

The components of a sample MRC utilization plan (handbook), including the elements described above, are listed in Appendix A of the MRC Technical Assistance Series publication Special Topics: Guidelines for Developing and Managing an MRC Unit.

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Last Updated on 8/29/2006