Measuring Disaster

THE CHALLENGE

Effective disaster management depends on knowing what to measure and how to measure it. Yet across practitioners across emergency management, public health, and community resilience fields often rely on proxy measures (whether doctrine is followed, whether boxes are checked, etc.) rather than meaningful assessments of whether systems and communities are actually better prepared. Without valid, reliable, and useful metrics, it is difficult to improve performance, allocate resources, or demonstrate impact.

THE APPROACH

- Partnerships with 30+ public health agencies to develop and test incident management performance metrics during real-life emergencies as Principal Investigator of $2M CDC project

- Interviews and literature review to build a functional framework for core incident management activities

- Development of systems-centric framework for assessing resilience of local systems

- Development of a $1.5M DHS stakeholder mapping framework as Principal Investigator

- Establishment of practitioner tools for analyzing risk and for measuring community resilience

- Assessment of resilience measurement approaches across multiple contexts

THE OUTCOME

A suite of measurement tools and frameworks spanning incident management, community resilience, and systems resilience, including an incident management measurement toolkit now deployed nationally, and peer-reviewed frameworks used by practitioners across multiple countries.

Further Reading

The Incident Management Measurement Toolkit RAND Corporation

The Incident Management Measurement Tool: A tool for measuring public health incident management during and after emergencies Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness

A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Incident Management Systems During Public Health Emergencies Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness

Resilience for Systems (R4S): A New Approach for Assessing the Resilience of Local Systems GOAL Global

Practitioner approaches to measuring community resilience: The analysis of the resilience of communities to disasters toolkit International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction

Participatory risk network analysis: A tool for disaster reduction practitioners International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction

Comparing networked and linear risk assessments: From theory to evidence International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction

Five Key Domains of Incident Management Domestic Preparedness