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From planning to resilience: The role (and value) of the emergency plan

Abstract:

The study of resilience in the emergency management field is nowadays in effervescence. Traditionally, the robustness of organizations against disasters is based on several pillars: equipment, staff training, organization and, especially, planning. All of these dimensions are aimed at increasing the preparedness and recovery of organizations against disasters. While the approaches to resilience in emergency management focus on the processes that implement these dimensions, we approach resilience-building processes from a different perspective: instead of focusing on planning-related activities, we pay attention to the principal outcome of such activities, namely emergency plan. We show how the management of the emergency plan can contribute to reinforcing an organization's resilience. First, we identify the major resilience-related emergency plan components and suggest improved emergency plans that consider the characteristics that contribute to resilience. Secondly, we show how to reinforce the resilience of the organizations that have emergency plans. Our study is based on QuEP, a quality-based framework for the assessment and improvement of emergency plan management within organizations. We have extended and integrated the resilience characteristics as practices of the QuEP's maturity level hierarchy to make up QuEP + R. We describe its resilience model and give details of a supporting tool, currently under development.