Hazards Vulnerability Assessment Collaboration & Resource Sharing Project

Context

Presidential Policy Directive 8 (PPD-8) “is designed to facilitate an integrated, all-of-nation/whole community, capabilities-based approach to preparedness.” It identifies collaborative processes as integral to planning strategies that enhance a response system’s capability to more effectively mitigate, plan for, respond to, and recover from major disasters.

Home Rule  is recognized as state constitutionally-based authority that allows a local city or county to set-up its own governmental system without a state charter. This autonomy presents barriers to cross- jurisdictional and sector cooperation. Additionally, a Home Rule environment increases the complexity of those barriers due to the jurisdictionally unique combinations of resources, perspectives and hazard-mitigation priorities. Regionalization occurs, and enhances resiliency through improved resource sharing; when geographically adjacent jurisdictions cooperatively implement systematized collaborative processes built on resource sharing partnerships to improve preparedness and response.

Background

The Center for Integrated Disaster Preparedness collaborated with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Hospital Preparedness Program using a framework derived from the PPD-8 to support a capabilities-based systematic approach to improving resiliency. In June of 2010, the collaboration initiated the 3-year long Hazards Vulnerability Assessment (HVA) Based Collaboration and Resource Sharing (HCRS) project in Colorado, a Home Rule state.

Project Objective and Scope

This project aims to enhance resiliency by developing key multi-functional, cross-sector, and multi-jurisdictional preparedness relationships within each of the 9 All-Hazard Regions established by the Colorado Department of Emergency Management.

The project builds out from the naturally occurring overlap of emergency response and preparedness under the National Incident Management System (NIMS) through the Incident Command System (ICS).

Lessons Learned

Streamlining HVA processes involves clarifying roles for stakeholders and highlights a need for clearly identified leaders to improve accountability.

Collaborative response planning to include non-hospital healthcare partners.

“Scope creep” issues cause wasteful resourcing, ineffective program and educational efforts, and undermine regional collaborations..

…and applied

Changes made in Year 2 survey processes based on preliminary results from Year 1, and the incorporation of the contractor’s facilitation and data collection tools, an improvement in data validation aligned with the targeted audience is expected.