Tag: EMT

Emergency Preparedness for Meeting Planners

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Emergency preparedness for meeting planners
This your meeting? Are you ready — for food poisoning, an accident, fire?

It’s a rare business that doesn’t host a meeting once in a while. While businesses are shut down as a result of the pandemic, this list may not apply! But as soon as you get back to face-to-face meetings, it will. So hang on to it!

Your meeting might be for marketing or educational purposes, or maybe to celebrate a holiday or having reached a company milestone.

Whatever the purpose, if you are the meeting planner, you have a long to-do list to be sure everything goes as planned. Even the simplest meeting needs decisions made about date and time, venue, food, invitations, theme and decorations, sign-in procedures, advertising and publicity, entertainment, audio-visual, vendors, etc.  

Our question for today:

Does your meeting to-do list include planning for emergencies?

If you’ve been reading here for a while, you know that we are constantly on the lookout for good emergency preparedness resources. And we look not just for ideas for family planning, but also for small business and, in particular, for neighborhood teams.

This Advisory will be useful for all three groups. But it is particularly vital for businesses, because . . .

If something goes badly wrong at your business meeting, and you could have prepared for it, you will be blamed. And you may be sued.

Please note: we are not attorneys, and this Advisory is not meant to give legal advice. Please consult with qualified professionals for detailed recommendations for your business and your meeting.

As you get ready to meet with those professionals, being ready with questions will save time and money. Here are some questions to start with.

1 – Is there a law that we must have a disaster preparedness plan for every meeting?

At Emergency Plan Guide we have never found a legal requirement on emergency preparedness for meeting planners. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t one!  Your professional advisers may have found it. Ask.

But at the same time we have read enough horror stories to know that people sue no matter what

They may claim that you should have let them know in advance that it was a dangerous neighborhood, that the venue was open to access from outside, that there was no internet security, that a storm was threatened, that medical aid was not immediately available, etc., etc. They will claim you were negligent.

2 – How do we protect ourselves if there is no clear-cut law?

Recent well-known lawsuits seem to have revolved around the legal concept of “Duty of Care.” The Legal Dictionary at Law.com defines Duty of Care this way: “a requirement that a person act toward others and the public with the watchfulness, attention, caution and prudence that a reasonable person in the circumstances would use. “

There’s a second legal term we also see connected with this same topic: “Standard of Care.” It is closely tied to “Duty of Care.” 

Basically, this is the “standard” that a reasonable person with the same qualifications would follow in a similar circumstance. As you might imagine, a professional would have a higher standard than a non-professional.

Here’s the challenge. Law.com adds:  “The problem is that the “standard” is often a subjective issue upon which reasonable people can differ.”

Not too helpful! 

Still, we already know that it just makes sense to prepare for emergencies to the best level you can.

3 – So what does a reasonable person do when planning a meeting?

These are my recommendations. They are similar to preparing for emergencies in your own home or business.

I see these as basic steps:

  • Evaluate your OWN level of preparedness. Who from your company will be there, what skills do they have, how ready will they be to respond to an emergency? What gaps do you find?
  • Identify risks for this particular event: geographic location and specific room or building, threats from weather and/or people (attendees or outsiders), security issues, availability of emergency medical personnel, cyber-security policies, firearms policies, alcohol policies, etc.
  • For each risk, confer with your business partners and then decide on who will respond and how. Make it clear who is responsible for what. Will any of the partners need to budget for additional personnel or equipment? List whom to call and all names and numbers. Decide who will interact with the news media or other officials, etc.
  • Confirm appropriate insurance coverages, yours and your meeting business partners.  
  • Write down and update your plan. Document your planning meetings. Share your decisions as appropriate in your marketing materials, since attendees deserve to know you have considered their safety in your planning. Document how everything went at the meeting.

This written document shows that you were attentive, prudent and thorough. This can be your very best protection against claims of negligence.

More resources on emergency preparedness for meeting planners

A while ago I attended a 2-hour training session sponsored by Meetings Today. The title was: Risk Management – Best Practices for Meetings and Events. The presenter, Brenda Rivers, also put out a 30-minute podcast on the Duty of Care. You may be able to find the podcast here: https://www.meetingstoday.com/magazines/article-details/articleid/32549/title/duty-of-care-keeping-safe

Meetings Today has also published a comprehensive template for meeting planners. If you have any responsibility for planning meetings, you may wish to download it for future reference. Here’s the link: https://www.meetingstoday.com/newsevents/industrynews/industrynewsdetails/articleid/31923/title/emergency-response-plan-template-for-planners

If you consider yourself to be a professional meeting planner, or just an enthusiastic meeting planner, please find out more about this topic!

Best of luck,

Virginia
Your Emergency Plan Guide team

P.S. Joe and I consider ourselves “enthusiastic meeting planners.”  Together, we have been responsible for literally hundreds of meetings for professional associations, Rotary International, neighborhood outreach for energy efficiency, and, of course, our local emergency response group. You can find one of our neighborhood group meeting planning Advisories here, recently updated.

And if you’re serious about putting on a successful meeting, check out this book from Alex Genadinik. There are a number of books available about planning events, of course, including those on starting a business as an event planner. I recommend this one because of Genadinik’s marketing emphasis.

Survival Vocab Quiz

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Survival VocabularyOK, so you’re in good shape when it comes to preparedness.

But can you talk to people about preparedness using THEIR words?

Here are three quick quizzes for three different groups. See how you do!

Group One: Your Prepper Relatives

While you may not be a red-hot survivalist, you probably have a few in the family. Maintain your dignity by knowing these prepper acronyms:

  1. EDC – Every day carry – collection of essential, small items that the survivalist has at all times in a pocket or purse.
  2. ATV – All-terrain-vehicle – A three or four-wheeled “buggy” that can carry preppers to safety through the woods or over the hills, when roads are impassible or too dangerous.
  3. BOB – Bug-Out-Bag – What you need to have ready to grab and go and that will keep you alive for at least 72 hours. At a minimum it contains shelter, water, and food.
  4. OTG – Off the grid – Surviving without access to electricity, municipal water, grocery stores, etc. Usually, it means setting up alternative living arrangements in an isolated area where you won’t be bothered by people who haven’t prepared in advance.
  5. SHTF – Shit Hits The Fan – All your preparations are made so that you will survive when the SHTF.

Group Two: Your Emergency Response Team Volunteers

These folks are committed and concerned. You owe it to them to provide good leadership by knowing what you’re taking about.

  1. CERT – Community Emergency Response Team member – Someone who has taken the (free) 24 hour course designed by FEMA (see DHS, below), offered by a city or other local organization. CERT members are volunteers who have received training in basic disaster response skills and who agree to provide emergency care until professionals arrive, and then support those professionals as needed.
  2. DHS – Department of Homeland Security – DHS was established in 2002, combining 22 different federal departments and agencies into one cabinet-level agency that now has 240,000 employees. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is part of DHS.
  3. EMT – Emergency Medical Technicians — EMTs are trained to provide emergency medical care before a person arrives at a hospital. EMTs may be associated with an ambulance company or a fire department; they may have different levels of training depending on their state or employer.
  4. SOP – Standard Operating Procedure – “The way we do things.” If you don’t have an SOP for your team, then you can’t expect any given outcome.
  5. Triage — Triage is the first step in an emergency. It is the process for sorting injured people into groups based on their need for medical treatment. Triage, by definition means that as a volunteer you don’t stop to help the first injured person you see.

Group Three: Co-workers

People at work deserve a plan for emergencies. If you’re involved, here are formal and informal terms you should be using:

  1. OSHA – Occupational Safety and Health Administration – OSHA is part of the Department of Labor. For our purposes, it is important to realize that OSHA’s purpose is to “provide a workplace free from serious recognized hazards.” Generally, this does NOT require any sort of emergency preparedness plan.
  2. BC/DR Plan – Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Plan — These terms are often used interchangeably but they both contain an approach to (1) preparing for emergencies, (2) taking action to limit damage before anything happens, (3) understanding how to get through the disaster when it does it, and then, (4) how to get back to BAU (see below).
  3. BIA – Business Impact Analysis – This is the first step to a Disaster Recovery plan. It’s a process that will identify and evaluate the potential effects of a disaster, accident or emergency on your critical business operations. The BIA will help set priorities for your planning.
  4. BAU – Business As Usual — After an emergency, BAU is what you want to get to. However, it’s possible that today in your workplace, if changes aren’t made right away, your current BAU will lead to a worse disaster than was necessary!
  5. SOW – Statement of Work — If your organization decides to hire a consultant to help in developing your BC or DR Plan, you’ll likely ask for, or actually provide yourself as part of the consulting contract, a statement of work that outlines exactly what is to be done.

Ok, had enough?! Here are a couple of suggestions to make this exercise valuable for a bigger audience.

  • Action Item #1: Consider printing out these definitions for your emergency response team members. Go over them out loud at a training meeting so everyone knows how they sound and can say them easily. Some of this will be new to some of your members, I can guarantee it!
  • Action Item #2: At work, share this list with co-workers or with your boss. If emergency preparedness and emergency planning are relatively new subjects, people will get a sense of confidence having been exposed to this vocab.

Let us know how you used the list!

Virginia
Your Emergency Plan Guide Team

P.S. And one last acronym I just can’t resist putting in here: TEOTWAWKI:

If you’ve spent time on survival websites, you’ll know that this stands for The End Of The World As We Know It. TEOTWAWKI usually assumes a BIG disaster – total economic collapse, cosmic event, pandemic, etc. I don’t know how the acronym is pronounced, if it even can be pronounced!

P.P.S. More preparedness vocabulary for people who like this sort of thing: