Preparedness Exercises 2.0: Alternative Approaches to Exercise Design That Could Make Them More Useful for Evaluating — and Strengthening — Preparedness

Another great article written for NPS.  This document is 19 pages long and took about 40 mins to read.  Great charts/graphs and statistics.  If you are a planner of exercises...read this article.  It discusses what type of exercises produces what types of results...for inquiring minds..

As one component of a preparedness program, exercises of these varied types are seen as a versatile tool that can help contribute to achieving a variety of different goals. Though taxonomies of exercise objectives vary in the literature, most include the following:³

• Planning — Exercises provide a structure to advance planning for a particular incident scenario, identifying problems and explore their solutions in focused way.
• Interagency Coordination — Exercises can act as a venue for members of different agencies to meet and interact, to build relationships that are important to effective coordination in a real event, to identify issues potentially falling in gaps of authority, jurisdiction, etc., to test mechanisms and technologies for interagency information sharing that might seldom be used in routine events, and to identify if there are agencies “missing” from plans that would be needed at a large scale disaster, accident, or terrorist attack.
• Public Education — Exercises can act as an “event” that, by being covered by the media and discussed publically, makes it possible to teach the public about the capabilities of response systems, creates the opportunity to educate them about preparedness actions they could take, and informs them about preparedness efforts of their local, state, or the federal government.
• Training — Exercises can make it possible to expose response staff to rare incidents and their unique demands — rather than their encountering them for the first time at a real emergency. Such simulations make it possible to teach responders or volunteers specific tasks, practice equipment use, and to learn or refresh other knowledge specific to an unusual incident.
• Evaluation — Exercises have been used to evaluate emergency preparedness activities in a variety of ways. Such evaluations range from very broad, qualitative assessments (e.g., ensuring all significant issues were considered in planning) to very detailed, quantitative studies (e.g., directly measuring the patient throughput of a medical facility). More elab