HLTH 6300 Week 3 Function Coordination Analysis Example

Who Held Which Function on Day 2: A Coordination Analysis of One Operational Period in the April Mill River Flood

Student Name

Walden University

HLTH 6300: Disaster Response and Recovery

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Who Held Which Function on Day 2: A Coordination Analysis of One Operational Period in the April Mill River Flood

Scope and Method

This analysis maps response functions to the bodies that carried them during one operational period of the April Mill River flood: Day 2, from 07:00 to 19:00, the busiest twelve hours of the response in this composite county. It examines four functions defined in national guidance: mass care, resource support, public information and health and medical (Federal Emergency Management Agency, 2019). The method is to identify, for each function, who was designated to lead it in the county plan, who actually led it during the period and which other bodies did related work. The mapping comes first; analysis of overlaps and gaps follows.

The Mapping

Table 1 maps each function to the bodies involved during the period.

Table 1

Functions Mapped to Bodies, Day 2, 07:00 to 19:00 (Composite County)

Mass Care: Lead in Plan Versus Lead in Practice

The county plan designated human services as the mass care lead, but during the period the Red Cross chapter ran the shelter, registered evacuees and arranged meals. Human services staff supported registration and handled a few clients with special needs. This difference between plan and practice was not a failure; the Red Cross is the main operator of shelters in many communities, and national guidance describes mass care as a function in which government and voluntary organizations share leadership (Federal Emergency Management Agency, 2019). The overlap that did cause trouble was with two churches that opened informal shelters on their own. Neither reported its count to the county, so at 19:00 the emergency operations center believed 140 people were sheltered when the true number was closer to 210.

Resource Support: Clear Ownership, Two Channels

Resource support had a clear owner: county emergency management handled all requests that exceeded a department's own equipment and passed requests for state assets to state emergency management. The overlap was with public works, which used its own equipment and also called contractors directly for pumps and sandbags without logging the requests in the emergency operations center. The national incident management system expects resource requests to be tracked through a common process so that resources are not double-ordered or lost (Federal Emergency Management Agency, 2017). On Day 2, two contractors were asked for the same pumps, and one crew sat idle for three hours. The gap was small but showed that clear ownership of a function does not ensure all related work flows through the owner.

Public Information: The Unowned Function

Public information had a designated lead, the county public information officer, but in practice no one held the function during the period. The officer was handling media calls about rescues, the city posted its own messages and the wastewater utility issued its advisory directly. When the city wrongly told residents the tap water was unsafe, no one with authority over all messages caught it. The national framework describes a joint information system for exactly this purpose (Federal Emergency Management Agency, 2017), and the county's plan included one, but it was not activated until Day 3. This was the period's most consequential gap, because it produced a false message that drove hundreds of calls and a run on bottled water.

Health and Medical: Lead Held, Partners Connected

Health and medical held together. The county health department led, the health officer joined the nursing home administrator in the 02:00 evacuation decision and the regional health care coalition located beds for the 96 residents in two facilities. National capability guidance expects health care coalitions to coordinate across hospitals and long-term care during emergencies (Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, 2016), and the coalition's prior planning with the nursing home paid off. The overlap with the hospital emergency department, which received flood injuries and a few evacuees, was managed through a liaison already in the emergency operations center.

Where Two Functions Overlapped

The clearest overlap between two functions came at the shelter, where mass care and health and medical met. Several evacuees arrived needing oxygen, dialysis transport or medication refills. The Red Cross shelter staff handled general care, while the health department sent a nurse at 15:00 after a call from the shelter manager. For about four hours, no one was sure whether evacuees with medical needs were the shelter's responsibility or the health department's. The plan assigned both functions but did not say which led for medically fragile evacuees in a general shelter. The overlap was resolved by a phone call rather than by design, which worked this time because the shelter manager and the health officer knew each other. It would not have worked if either had been new to the role.

Overlaps like this one are not failures in themselves; disasters create needs that cross functional lines. They become failures when no one knows who decides, and the mapping suggests the county should resolve this particular boundary in writing.

What the Mapping Shows

Across the four functions, problems arose not where ownership was formally absent but where related work happened outside the owner's view: informal shelters outside mass care, contractor calls outside resource support and agency messages outside public information. The function that worked best, health and medical, was the one whose partners had planned together before the event. The finding suggests that the county's next plan update should focus less on naming leads, which it had already done, and more on making sure related work reports to the lead, and on activating the joint information system early.

References

Federal Emergency Management Agency. (2017). National Incident Management System (3rd ed.).

Federal Emergency Management Agency. (2019). National response framework (4th ed.).

Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response. (2016). 2017-2022 health care preparedness and response capabilities. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.