Emergency Response Functional Roles
Example
During a measles outbreak, a public health nurse who is usually assigned to work in a school health program may be assigned to perform contact tracing and immunization history evaluation activities, while another school health nurse may be assigned to perform emergency department surveillance. Each of these individuals may be reporting to an Operations Section Chief who is not from their usual school health program in the DOH. However, within the ICS these public health nurses are expected to perform emergency response functional roles (which are different from what they do every day) and will take directions from and report to the Operations Section Chief or a Unit Leader within the Operations Section.
Emergency response functional roles are clearly delineated specific descriptions of what the responder (paid or volunteer) is responsible for doing with regard to the event. These roles may be ones that are used in the agency on a day-to-day basis, but they may also be roles that are used only during an emergency event. Various staff in the agency may be cross-trained to perform a range of emergency response functional roles, so that surge capacity needs can be rapidly filled during an event. When performing an emergency response functional role, the public health employee may not necessarily be reporting to his/her usual supervisor, and in some instances may be working under the direction of another agency. For clarity, anticipated functional roles should be identified in advance, and for each a Job Action Sheet (JAS) should be developed. A Job Action Sheet is a document that describes a specific emergency response functional role, and is described in detail in a later section of this document (see 4. Job Action Sheets).