Workforce Activation

Surge Response

Deployment Team Process Guide

Most Public Health organizations are staffed to handle day-to-day, 8-5 business. Managing a workforce in the face of a Medical Emergency or Disaster will require more staff than you have available.

This section provides guidance for the deployment call-out process.

Public Health leads Emergency Support Function 8: Health and Medical Area Command (HMAC). HMAC organizes its response using the Incident Command System. Workforce mobilization and staff deployment is a function of the Finance & Administration Section of HMAC. The Finance & Administration Section maintains distinct processes for deploying three categories of human resources to support response operations :

• Deployment procedures for Public Health employees
• Deployment procedures for contract workers
• Deployment procedures for Public Health Reserve Corps

This manual describes the process for deployment of Public Health employees. The other procedures are described in the Public Health Volunteer Management Plan and the Area Command Procedures Manual.

The regional Health and Medical response, overseen by HMAC, may require participation by Public Health staff to meet its operational objectives. Public Health staff may participate in the response by performing duties the same as their day-to-day work functions, or by performing duties different from their everyday work. Public Health’s intent is to assign employees to teams or specific roles based on the employee’s skills, experience, training, and preference – but a flexible and effective response to the event may require staff to “go above and beyond.”

Public Health also strives to keep employees working conditions the same or similar during emergency deployments by assigning employees to roles which:

• Are located at or near their regular work site or residence
• Have the same work schedule as the employee’s regular work schedule
• When overtime is needed, giving employees the option to accept or decline the overtime

However, during emergencies, it may not be possible for Public Health to maintain the same or similar working conditions for employees being redeployed, and changes in work site, work schedule, or mandatory overtime may be required with very little notice.

Employees may be called on to participate in emergency response operations in three ways. Employees can be:

• Deployed by their divisions to augment staffing for division services experiencing a surge in demand
• Activated and deployed by HMAC as members of pre-trained emergency response teams whose skills are needed to support the emergency response.
• Identified by their division Business Continuity (BC) Lead and deployed by HMAC to fill an emergent need for the regional health and medical emergency response.

The number of employees activated during an emergency will depend on the type and size of the event.

The goal of Public Health workforce deployment is to ensure that all Public Health employees have the opportunity to participate in a coordinated, integrated emergency planning and response effort while keeping the department’s Priority 1 services operating. For more information on Priority 1 services, refer to Public Health’s Business Continuity toolkit.