Downloads & Free Reading Options - Results

Societies build emergency response systems to be there when damaging incidents-whether natural or caused by man-occur. Though the effectiveness of those systems in responding to everyday emergencies is easy to see, knowing how prepared they are to deal with large-scale incidents-which, fortunately, are far rarer-is much more difficult. Most of the time, responses to even large-scale emergencies go very well. But sometimes they do not, leading to questions about why response activities did not go as expected and what policy actions should be taken in response. Practitioners and researchers in many fields have devoted significant effort to developing ways to measure emergency preparedness. Progress has been made-in the creation of systems to assemble data on preparedness inputs, national policy documents that begin to set standards for capability levels, and exercises designed to test preparedness systems-but the ability to measure preparedness has still been highlighted as an area requiring attention and innovation (FEMA, 2009b). This work helps address that shortfall by approaching preparedness assessment from a perspective that is very different from those used in most previous efforts.