Emergency Response Team Maintenance: Exercise Swaps!
Rachel Jacky, Community Emergency Services Manager, Portland (OR) Fire Bureau

Community emergency response teams—in neighborhoods, schools or businesses— always benefit from realistic practice. It’s those field exercises that help maintain and improve the skills of individual members and strengthen their teamwork. For the fire departments, police departments and emergency management agencies who sponsor the teams, field exercises can also provide some critical practice in interfacing with our community-based disaster response workforce.

That’s the good news. Here’s the challenge: As useful as field exercises can be for the teams, it takes a lot of time and energy to design, conduct and evaluate a good exercise. And anyone who’s responsible for a community emergency response team program will tell you that there’s never enough time and energy.

So what do you do when those enthusiastic teams start asking for more exercises? One solution may be to involve the teams themselves in designing, coordinating, conducting and evaluating field exercises for each other. We call these events “Exercise Swaps” and they can have a number of advantages:

·         With volunteers playing key roles in the process, we can offer more field exercises to the teams. 

·         An exercise can be tailored to meet the training objectives of a single team.

·         An exercise can be designed for and staged in the team’s own neighborhood. 

·         The team who designs the exercise can learn as much as the team who goes through the exercise.

Here’s an example: Over an 18-month period, Team A went through some tabletop exercises and a citywide exercise that was staged outside their own neighborhood. As they got better organized and more experienced, Team A identified several operational issues, i.e. overall team logistics, greater familiarity with the geography of their neighborhood, and a reliable system for transporting patients in their hilly terrain. What they really wanted was an exercise in their own area that would focus on these challenges. 

 Team B went through roughly the same developmental process and ended up wanting more practice at medical triage, prioritizing incidents, and tracking and documenting action taken to address those incidents.

 Sound familiar? Like many community emergency response teams, Team A and Team B had a good sense of their strengths and challenges from past exercises and training. So they decided to pair up for an Exercise Swap.

 Here’s how it works: At a joint meeting, the two teams discuss the aspects of team operations that they’d each like to focus on. At the same meeting, they receive joint basic training on exercise design and evaluation. They learn the terminology and process, and then the basics of how to design and conduct an exercise.

With some guidance from program staff, Team A then meets without Team B to design an exercise for them. Then Team A sets up and conducts the exercise in Team B’s own neighborhood. Then the two teams swap—Team B designs, sets up and conducts an exercise for Team A in its neighborhood.

 In their role as exercise designers, each group uses the other team’s objectives to develop the scenario and major events for the exercise. They also carry out some of the most time-consuming tasks in setting up the exercise, e.g., scouting the neighborhood for likely sites to stage various incidents, and getting permission to stage gas leaks, downed power lines and injured victims in residents’ yards. They also play a critical part in conducting the exercise as messengers, simulators and evaluators.

There’s another element to the exercise swaps: Food! Returning to the old adage that volunteer programs run on food (and I believe it), each exercise concludes with an evaluation and then a potluck sponsored by the “home team” in their neighborhood. Both teams and the fire station crews who might participate in part of an exercise enjoy lunch and a little social time. This ends the event on a happy note and gives everybody a chance to talk about successes and remaining challenges to each NET.

Going through a field exercise is always likely to enhance team skills. What may be surprising—the unanticipated benefit—is the degree to which designing and conducting an exercise will do the same thing. According to one of the team leaders who participated in an exercise swap, “An exercise in our own neighborhood is a much more practical method of getting training and experience—the most realistic thing next to having a real disaster. Designing and carrying out the exercise for the other NET [Neighborhood Emergency Team] is also very thought-provoking in terms of coordinating our own Team.”  

 The time and energy a team puts into developing and conducting an exercise for another team allows program staff to offer more exercises than would otherwise be possible. There are of course some challenges. One concern is to keep the design team on track with the other team’s stated objectives. Knowing that they can be pretty imaginative, it’s also important to assist the design team in developing a scenario that is realistic and not more theatrical than can be staged with limited time and resources.

Is this idea the answer to having enough resources to conduct regular field exercises for CERTs? Probably not. Can two teams do a successful swap without guidance and some direction from program staff? Definitely not. Are exercise swaps another element in a bag of tricks for keeping neighborhood teams active and effective? We think so!

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