Emergency Management Program Goals & Objectives for a Hospital

Hospitals provide an integral link in hazards response. Recognizing this, the Federal Emergency Management Agency integrated health care facilities into the National Incident Management System (NIMS) and developed 14 specific objectives for hospitals to include in their emergency operations plans. The agency developed the objectives to help hospitals implement NIMS, enhance efficiency and response and recovery effectiveness and improve relations between hospitals and local governments, public health and emergency management agencies. Hospitals should design emergency management goals in line with these objectives.

Mitigation Goal

• A hospital's mitigation goal should address preventing or lessening a disaster's impact on itself and its community. The FEMA objectives for meeting this goal include adopting NIMS and properly utilizing federal preparedness awards to support implementation.

Preparedness Goal

• The preparedness goal addresses planning and policy development activities in which the hospital identifies its critical resources in emergency management and develops plans for continued access and utilization. According to the NIMS objectives, the hospital accomplishes this by incorporating NIMS-compliant equipment, training, exercises, responses, evaluation and corrective actions in its emergency operations plans, standard operating procedures and standard operating guidelines. It also includes participating in mutual aid agreements with public, private and nongovernmental organizations; identifying personnel who need to complete ICS-100, ICS-200, IS-700 and IS-800 trainings; and incorporating NIMS and ICS principles into all hospital training and exercises.

Response Goal

• The response goal relates to training staff members in appropriate response techniques and testing their response abilities. The objectives to accomplish this include incorporating data, equipment and communication interoperability into the acquisitions, applying shared terminology using plain language communications standards; facilitating the collection and distribution of accurate incident information; managing emergency incidents and exercises in accordance with the ICS and NIMS; consistent application of incident action planning and common communications plans; adopting the principle of public information and using public information procedures to gather, verify, coordinate and disseminate accurate information.

Recovery Goal

• The hospital recovery goal is to develop processes to re-establish operations post-event. The NIMS objectives requiring revision and update of emergency operations plan and standard operating procedures and guidelines also apply here, as do developing inter-agency mutual-aid agreements.