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Establishing: Establishing and Clarifying Policies and Procedures

Each organization, including the Medical Reserve Corps (MRC), has policies and procedures that it follows to achieve its mission effectively. However, the MRC’s involvement in health and medical activities requires an emphasis on certain types of policies and procedures. To most effectively achieve your unit’s vision, you will need to create policies and procedures that guide the unit’s development and volunteer activities.

The need for clear policies is particularly important in complex operational environments such as the MRC. Your unit’s volunteers may experience difficult and risky situations, so they will need the support that comes from well-defined policies and procedures related to volunteer activation, disaster communications, safety, security, psychological well-being, use of ID cards and special-issue badges, and after-action reports.

Regardless of whether they are general statements of principle or specific rules, comprehensive procedures provide the structure that serves to actualize your policies. For example, an MRC may operate with a harm reduction policy or of informed consent for the people it serves. The procedures related to these policies provide the steps for achieving them. Training everyone to know the policies and related procedures can help your MRC function effectively as a team. More importantly, policies are intended to reduce the risk of harm and to reduce unnecessary conflict.

Establishing and communicating policies can be challenging and time consuming. It is an ongoing task, because policies cannot be incorporated and then left unmanaged. As your MRC’s working situation is likely to change, it is helpful to continually revisit the policies to verify that they still reflect the working conditions and your unit’s vision.

Establishing policies and later clarifying or modifying them is cyclical. You will re-evaluate them repeatedly to ensure they are the best possible. One potential source of policies for your MRC unit is your housing agency. The agency that sponsors your MRC may have existing policies related to volunteers or their functions (such as client information privacy policies). Use your housing agency’s policies or develop your unit’s policies to be consistent with the housing agency to the extent possible.

Policies and procedures for MRC units can be categorized as follows:

Policies governing unit leadership (e.g., bylaws for an advisory board, if applicable)
Application and screening procedures
Information management policies
Risk management policies
Activation/deactivation procedures
Policies and procedures regarding deployment and demobilization of the unit or of individual volunteers
Required and recommended training for volunteers

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Last Updated on 8/23/2006