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Coordinating: Assigning Roles and Responsibilities

Accomplishing these specific tasks with your response partners will require consensus regarding roles and responsibilities. Ultimately, this will determine what your MRC volunteers are permitted to do, and will define appropriate training, required certification, and any legal restrictions that might apply in your area. To begin, you will want to clarify your partners’ needs and how your partners envision integrating your volunteers into their existing operations.

Knowing the authority of declaring a public health or other emergency in your community is critical to a well-developed plan. It is important to decide when to activate an emergency operations plan and to recognize that the determination should not be made without appropriate information and authority. If it has not been decided already, this will need to be established in advance with appropriate city, county, and state officials.

Once the designated authority has recognized a valid need to implement the emergency operations plan, it is important that key decisionmakers are available to determine which aspects to implement. Remember, most plans will address various natural and manmade emergencies and disasters that may affect the community. This also means that although its volunteers are assigned certain roles relative to existing capabilities, the nature of an incident may not warrant their participation.

Each local plan must be flexible enough to accommodate the unexpected—the plan should exceed needs at any given time and remain flexible. Although this may be challenging, it is possible to achieve over time. If your community is new to this type of planning, you may not achieve balance in the beginning. However, by beginning the planning process and by revisiting this plan regularly, you and your response partners will become more adept at multitasking.

Spontaneous, Unaffiliated Volunteers

The MRC was established primarily to plan for spontaneous, unaffiliated health and medical volunteers who almost always volunteer during times of community need. This well-meaning display of community spirit, however, can sometimes interfere with the difficult and complex procedures that must be implemented by the regular emergency services and medical and public health personnel. Training medical and public health volunteers ahead of time and defining their roles and responsibilities in the larger response system is one way to convert a potential problem into a potential resource.

Many local governments and community organizations may already have developed plans and procedures for managing spontaneous, unaffiliated volunteers. These plans and procedures also may describe the establishment and operation of volunteer reception centers to manage these volunteers. For example, Florida, Ohio, and the Kansas City metropolitan area have well-developed plans for managing spontaneous, unaffiliated volunteers and managing volunteer reception center operations. Determine whether these plans exist in your community or work with your response partners and other community organizations that utilize volunteers to develop these plans.

Despite preparation, however, spontaneous medical and health volunteers will appear during emergencies. These individuals may be:

Unaware of the MRC
Newly drawn to volunteering
Visiting from other states or communities

Regardless, it is important to plan and determine how to manage these volunteers, ensuring that they remain safe and non-interfering, and using what they have to offer. Many local governments and community organizations may have already developed plans and procedures for managing these volunteers. These plans and procedures may describe the establishment and operation of volunteer reception centers to manage them.

Finally, develop a procedure for deactivating your regular MRC volunteers for their own safety and so they do not interfere with ongoing emergency operations once they are no longer needed. It is as important to know when to cease activity as it is to initiate it.

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Last Updated on 8/18/2006