Good Emergency Management Practice: The Essentials
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fires called the Incident Command System (ICS). An outbreak of an infectious disease has many parallels to a forest fire in that it starts small and spreads, sometimes rapidly, and may also start up in areas distant from the initial outbreak. Both require speed and flexibility of command and control structures to achieve effective control and eradication. The ICS is a “standardized on-scene emergency-management concept specifically designed to allow its user(s) to adopt an integrated organizational structure equal to the complexity and demands of single or multiple incidents, without being hindered by jurisdictional boundaries.”6 The following text is the overview of ICS Wikipedia7 in April 2010. ICS consists of a standard management hierarchy and procedures for managing temporary incident(s) of any size. ICS procedures should be sanctioned by legitimate authorities, and then applied in training well before an incident occurs. ICS includes procedures to select and form temporary management hierarchies to control funds, personnel, facilities, equipment and communications. Personnel are selected according to standard rules previously sanctioned by legitimate authorities. ICS is a system designed to be used or applied from the time an incident occurs until the requirement for management and operations no longer exist. ICS is interdisciplinary and organizationally flexible to meet the following management challenges: –– Meets the needs of a jurisdiction to cope with incidents of any kind or complexity
(i.e. it expands or contracts as needed);
–– Allows personnel from a wide variety of agencies to meld rapidly into a common
management structure with common terminology;
–– Provides logistical and administrative support to operational staff; –– Be cost-effective by avoiding duplication of efforts and continuing overhead; –– Provide a unified, centrally authorized, legitimate emergency organization.
The key elements of ICS can be summarized as: • the modular structure; • scalability; • integration of logistics and operations; and • the multidisciplinary element. While ICS may or may not be formally adopted, a modular command and control system is needed. This is the principle behind the structure discussed above of having separate units for surveillance, culling, biosecurity, etc. Each unit has a defined responsibility that is discharged by the head of that unit and each unit should be allowed to grow to meet the size of the task. Within each unit, the head of the unit has day to day operational responsibility with a system of regular reporting back to and receiving instruction from the next level of the hierarchy.
National (ANIMAL) Disease Control Centre Countries should establish a permanent NDCC. In the event of an outbreak of an emergency animal disease, the NDCC should be responsible to the CVO for coordinating all emergency disease-control measures in the country, and it should be in proximity to the 6
Source: Justice Institute of British Columbia, Canada, on ICS.
7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident_Command_System
