SESSION DESCRIPTION

The Discussion-Based Exercise for Healthcare Facilities is an activity-based training. It is designed to prepare participants to be the in-house disaster exercise design expert for their facility. This Discussion-based exercise session is the first of a two-part series to train a healthcare EM in exercise design. This first training will focus completely on discussion-based exercise design and how these types of exercises play an important role in your exercise program.  This training will ensure participants learn what they need to do to comply with CMS, Joint Commission, and other regulatory bodies’ required exercises.

Participants attending both courses will learn:

• 7 types of exercises including considerations involving cost, time frame and personnel

• Overview of a Comprehensive Exercise Plan

• Exercise Design Process

• Exercise Facilitation

• After Action Reports and Improvement Plans as required by accrediting agencies

• Exercise documentation including Situation Manual and Evaluator Tools

• How to write a Tabletop Exercise

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Who should participate?

Personnel tasked with developing and conducting disaster exercises for their facility. The goal is to give participants the information and tools they need to design and conduct internal exercises. The training will also better enable them to participate as members of the design team for multi-agency exercises.

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Commitment & pre-requisites

Because each module of the training builds on previous modules, participants are asked to commit to the full training period.
We highly recommend participants complete IS-120.C: An Introduction to Exercises prior to attending the course.

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About the Presenters:

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Tobais Watson, Exercise Planner

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Tobias Watson is an Exercise Planner with Constant Associates and has a passion making preparedness exercises practical and applicable. He has over 10 years of professional experience encompassing emergency management, firefighting, and emergency medical services. Using his knowledge of field response, he is better able to understand the needs of those in the first responder/receiver capacity and the differences between paper plans and frontline needs.  

Mr. Watson graduated from Union College in Nebraska with a Bachelor of Science in International Rescue and Relief. His highlights from college include five weeks of survival and rescue training in the Colorado wilderness, and a Capstone semester in Nicaragua studying and applying skills in survival, austere medicine, global health, and firefighting. 

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Mr. Watson has served in multiple roles for emergency management providing training for emergency response, guidance for COVID-19, and program management and strategic development of healthcare emergency preparedness. His previous role was the Emergency Preparedness Coordinator for a two-campus hospital with a Level II Trauma Center in Lincoln, NE. 

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