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We need clearly defined roles, and responsibilities, decision-making structure, and CORE Team program administration to enhance emergency response.
Recommended Approach: Centralization of Roles and Responsibilities
Proposed Actions:
Establish a Central Program Owner: the program owner should be centralized as a single entity. Currently, EMCR is most reflective of the attributes to successfully centralize and operate CORE. The attributes are as follows:
Administration and Finance
Comprehensive understanding of emergency management-related processes, protocols, and policies
Able to take on administrative and coordination tasks within the domain of emergency management
Knowledge and authority to establish and enforce these processes to relevant emergency response groups
Response and Operations
Strong relationship with ministries' internal emergency response teams
Solid understanding and familiarity with their needs, processes, and capabilities
Able to effectively play a coordinating role during cross-ministry collaboration for surge capacity response efforts.
Staffing and Deployment
Decision-making authority for funding requests and deploying talent during province-wide emergency events
Well-resourced and funded to maintain a permanent, dedicated team to run the program and continuously improve the program and the product.
Training and Development
Solid understanding of orientation and specific training needs to build a more qualified roster and support ministries to develop skilled talent for emergency and disaster response.
Allocate Dedicated Resources: a dedicated team and resources are needed to administer the program and to continue product development. There are a variety of knowledge, skills, and abilities that we will need to continuously improve the administration and management of the program. Potential roles include (see Appendix C for more details):
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Preliminary estimates indicate that the program will cost $4 million annually. Costing assumptions can be found in the appendices. Further work will be required to substantiate these estimates.
Supporting Key Findings
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Ministries feel that a centralized model will establish clear decision-making structure, roles, and responsibilities, and foster strong relationships with other ministries involved in response.
Provinces across Canada have established a centralized approach and are seeing various benefits such as improved situational awareness, better collaboration, and easier access to information.
There is a perception that centralization can support a more consistent experience for CORE Team members through a comprehensive understanding of emergency related processes, protocols, and policies
A side-of-the-desk approach to overseeing the program is no longer adequate due to the increasing need for administrators to access the roster of members to respond to emergencies. Other jurisdictions have allocated full-time staff who are well-trained and available year-round to allow these centralized structures to streamline their processes and systems.
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In-house skills and resources within the BC Public Service are not being fully utilized to support emergency and disaster response.
Recommended Approach:Improved Training and Skills Matching
Proposed Actions:
Training Strategy
Create a training strategy that outlines the learning and development needed to support generalists and specialists, including learning modules.
Increase Training Offerings
Ensure that training for general and specialized roles is available. This includes proper funding to support learning development such as job shadowing during activations. We also need to build training pathways for the roles and functions needed for deployment so that we can increase our capacity for more experienced members for deployment. Finally, we need to standardize basic training for CORE Team members across the province, no matter what type of emergency they get deployed in.
Skills Matchmaking
Developing a process for matchmaking roles and functions needed for deployment in relation to the members’ current position in their base jobs. This will provide equitable compensation and a better experience for members as expectations are clear and we are meeting people where they are at. In addition, there is a need to expand the current job descriptions for deployment functions to increase clarity around the skills needed.
Supporting Key Findings
The absence of a consistent, province-wide training plan has created regional disparities in response approaches and contributes to a shortage of specialists. There is a growing need for more specialists to be trained and deployed.
During major emergencies, staff shortages often exceed our response capabilities, forcing us to outsource for expertise. We currently rely on seasonal and temporary staff, and struggle to retain experienced staff long-term. This situation highlights the need for dedicated, full-time emergency management teams to effectively handle ongoing emergencies.
Training opportunities are limited by the high cost of specialized training and a lack of standardized qualifications and experiencefor critical response roles.
In its current state, training inadequacy is leading tounderprepared individuals being deployed,resulting in performance issues and fatigue over time.
There is a need for a consistent understanding of the specific training needs to build and attract a more qualified talent pool and support ministries to develop skilled talent for emergency and disaster response.
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