 State and local governments have the responsibility for training and exercising their emergency response providers. Today we'll look at the post-incident reporting process and how lessons learned can help Homeland Security officials prevent, prepare for, respond to and recover from emergencies. On this edition of Live Response. The most effective way to evaluate preparedness prior to an actual incident is by exercising. This provides a risk-free environment for jurisdictions to review their plans to prevent, respond to and recover from natural and man-made emergencies. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Office for Domestic Preparedness has developed a threat and performance-based exercise program called the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program. In Volume 2 of HCEAP, there is guidance for exercise evaluation and improvement. During an exercise, a large amount of information will be gathered and analyzed. The goal of data analysis is to assess performance by identifying what aspects of the exercise went well and what areas need improvement. Well, essentially you're talking about the after-action report. The first part of the after-action report is usually that executive summary or that overview. One to two-page summary of what occurred during the exercise, what were the strengths observed, what were areas of improvement, something you could give to your senior officials so they would get a snapshot of the entire response during the exercise. Although every recommendation that comes out of the after-action report will be useful, those recommendations that may apply to other jurisdictions should be highlighted in the exercise debrief. Some of the debrief components include a player critique or hot wash, the construction of the after-action report. Conducting an after-action conference and the development of an improvement plan. Immediately after the exercise, the evaluation team will attend a hot wash with the players and controllers. We go through the hot wash where we get feedback from our emergency responders who have just gone through the exercise. They tell us what went well and what they believe that we can improve upon. We take that information, put it into the after-action report. The after-action report also summarizes the exercise, the scenario of the exercise, the objectives of the exercise, and gives a timeline of how the responders reacted to the scenario. Sometimes when we say the word plan in the communities, people automatically visualize a huge document. An improvement plan really looks more like an improvement strategy, which has, again, goals, objectives, respective activities to meet those objectives and identifies people that are going to be responsible for those activities and gives them a deadline. The improvement plan should be a means by which the lessons learned from the exercise are turned into concrete, measurable steps that result in improved response capabilities. Since 2002, there have been significant presidential directives that have focused on Homeland Security. National Directive 5 was designed to enhance the ability of the United States to manage domestic incidents by establishing a single comprehensive national incident management system. That's what we're really looking at is getting people to improve upon their processes, improve upon their resource management, upon their mutual aid capability. We want them to start not only focusing not only on response, but we also want them to focus on prevention, preparedness, response, recovery actions, as well as mitigation actions. It takes it through the whole, we're letting our folks to start looking at domestic incident management through the whole life cycle of an incident. We want them to focus not only on the incident itself, we want them to have them focus on pre-incident, incident, and post-incident activities. You need to push your public safety people who are routinely involved in exercise planning and evaluation processes to become intricately familiar with the Homeland Security Exercise Evaluation Program. We look at that as a infrastructure tool to build a foundation so that people can learn how to apply this process, which ultimately does assess capabilities. As evaluated activities, exercises provide a method for improvement, as well as a way to demonstrate a community's resolve in preparing for a disastrous event. This is Live Response. I'm Al Rochelle and we are coming to you live from the facilities of the National Terrorism Preparedness Institute at St. Petersburg College in St. Petersburg, Florida. Live Response is brought to you by the National Terrorism Preparedness Institute at St. Petersburg College and is sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security. Live Response is also an interactive program and, as always, our television and online viewing participants can be part of this discussion by calling a toll-free number. We'll put it up on the screen several times throughout the program. It's 1-888-870-3000. Call anytime during this one-hour program or you can faxes your questions. Here's how you do that. It's 727-341-4141. This is a great opportunity to interact with today's panel of experts and we have some great experts again with us today. All right, let's get started. First I would like to introduce Lieutenant David Custer. Lieutenant Custer is the chairman of the Emergency Planning Committee in Morgantown, West Virginia, and is the operations officer for the state of West Virginia, Region 2, Weapons of Mass Destruction Regional Response Team. He also provides instruction in areas of fire suppression, hazmat response, rescue operations, infectious diseases, and emergency preparedness to fire departments, police departments, local, state, and federal agencies. Next we have Josh Fishburne. Mr. Fishburne is the state exercise manager for the Idaho Bureau of Homeland Security, where he is the Homeland Security State Exercise Specialist. Now in addition to all hazards exercise design, Mr. Fishburne is familiar with Task Force Management, the Incident Command System, and Emergency Management Program Training Facilitation. And finally we have Mr. Mike Kaminski. Mr. Kaminski is an exercise program analyst for the Department of Homeland Security's Office for Domestic Preparedness. Mr. Kaminski acts as a liaison between the Office of State and Local Government Ordination and Preparedness, the Office for Domestic Preparedness Program staff, and the exercise partners. He also manages the delivery of Homeland Security program exercises and directs exercise support programs to state, territorial, tribal, and local governments. Gentlemen, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you for having me. Big and very important topic, and I want to start out right from the top. We're not talking about just creating paperwork just for paperwork's sake. No, we're not. We're looking at, throughout the nation, we're looking at increasing everyone's capability. Federal, state, and local partners increasing their capability to handle domestic incidents. We want them to be able to work together coherently and effectively in managing incidents of national significance, which we recently have affected this nation. And in a big way. Josh, on the state level, same thing? Yes, definitely. It's not checking a box at all. The findings from these after-action reports make a great deal of difference at the state level, local level, and federal level as to where are we going to go from here? How can we improve? What can we do better? And because of that, that's a vital aspect of any exercise activity, planning, developing, and evaluating, and producing that after-action report, and with that, an improvement plan also. Sure, Dave. And from the local perspective? Basically with the state. You know, you have to have a good plan in place. You've got to get a committee put together where you have a good plan in place so you can go ahead and come up with some objectives to work your exercise out. Now as we have often done with our programs, ladies and gentlemen, we have somebody from the federal, the state, and the local level, so hopefully we can talk a lot about the intermingling and what kind of communications flow, both from the bottom to the top and the top to the bottom, all the way through. Let's start at the very beginning. Before you worry about reviewing what you've done, you have to begin to plan for reviewing what you've done. Isn't that right? Right. And mainly, under the National Incident Management System concepts and principles, there are the different components, the major components, and one of the major components is preparedness. And under the preparedness components of NIMS, there is the planning, the exercise and training, and other supporting components. And today we're focusing on the exercise and the exercise evaluation of that planning process and its preparedness cycle. We're looking at identifying objectives for that exercise. We're looking at identifying a strategy that will be employed to validate the plans and all the previous work that has been done, pre-incidence, so to speak, as well as identifying an evaluation methodology of how we want to evaluate our exercises to be supporting our exercise objectives, and then also look at providing subsequent training for our evaluators, our controllers, and also the participants on their roles and responsibilities and duties during the exercise. It's not necessarily going to be a scripted exercise. Most of them are free play exercises, but we want everyone to have the clear understanding what their duties and responsibilities are during the exercise and evaluation process. Now what existed before these plans that we're trying to talk about here today? There were a variety of systems, but nothing really brought everything together like the HC program does. FEMA had some systems, of course their old rep programs, CSEP programs, things like that. There's various programs, but the HC program is a little bit unique. Its goal is to sort of be an umbrella for all sorts of programs to come together for exercise evaluation and development and design. With that, there are some key differences from some of those old programs. The evaluation, which we're here talking about today, is probably one of the biggest parts of those difference. Instead of just creating an after-action report, we actually really have some accountability where we have to turn that in now, and from that we have to create an improvement plan and follow up with those improvement plan items. So that's a really valuable change that we've seen with the HC program. Dave, tell me more about these deadlines. Are they realistic deadlines? Who sets them, et cetera, et cetera? Well, ODP has deadlines that you need to follow when you do your reporting. First of all, after an incident, they're required within 60 days that you provide a preliminary post-exercise report to ODP. This basically tells them who, what, where, and when of the exercise, gives them an idea of how the exercise evolved and how it played out. And also, after you have your preliminary, this is the start of your after-action reporting. After every exercise, whether it's a drill, whether it's a seminar, tabletop, functional, or full-scale exercise, then an after-action report is going to have to be put together to send into ODP. And is that just to make sure that, pardon me for using a phrase we often use in the media, is that nothing slips through the cracks? Basically, we do want to ensure that federal, state, and local partners all understand their roles and responsibilities in this process. And there are some reporting requirements. Unfortunately, or fortunately, it's tied to funding requirements. There is a feedback loop on information. So we all want to ensure that all partners understand their duties and responsibilities in this entire process. Now, I was noticing that when we were talking about the preparedness cycle, there are basically three key points. Identify the objectives, evaluators methodology, and evaluators and participant training. Tell me about the role of evaluators in particular, because I'm interested in that. Well, evaluators are very key, because those are the individuals who are going to validate the objectives of the exercise. They are going to quantify and qualify the activities that they're observing or the activities that they are getting information on and data that are getting information on depending on the incident, excuse me, depending on the exercise. It could either be a discussion-based exercise, such as a tabletop, or it could be an operations-based exercise, such as a functional exercise or a full-scale exercise, where you actually have boots on the ground going through activities and dealing with the exercise. But you have evaluators kind of overarching viewpoint is for them to review and keep an eye on what is everybody doing, keeping things down. They're a passive player. They're a passive participant in this exercise. They don't control the exercise. They don't have no input into it. But they just gather a lot of information and they look for key activities that are supposed to be going on during the exercise. When we talked about the after-action report, sometimes in the business world, that's one of those areas that is least paid attention to. But in this particular case, I would think it becomes almost as important as the drill itself. Definitely. It's vital. And with that, it's very important to begin your exercise evaluation criteria and methodology as you begin to plan the exercise. It's not something that's just done several days prior to the exercise. Let's figure out how we're going to evaluate this. It's very important to get the buy-in from the players. This is how we plan to evaluate. This is what we plan to evaluate on. This is who is going to evaluate you. As one of those cycle preparedness activities was training, we provide evaluator training so that they all know what their duties and responsibilities are so that they can come prepared knowing the scenario and knowing what's going to happen so that they can best facilitate a very objective exercise methodology for evaluation. Go ahead. Follow up on that. Your evaluator should be your subject expert and it has some information or knowledge of that scenario or what they're going to evaluate. That brings in a lot of knowledge, education, and experience that they can provide a good feedback to the after-action report. So subject matter experts should be utilized more when you have an evaluator. Now, I'm curious, once you've got some of these reports together, how do you know who gets the report, who doesn't get the report, how do you keep it out of the hands of the media or at least report to them what you want them to know and what really wouldn't help the media but might be distracting? Assimilating the information is usually directed back to the participants of the exercise. Your stakeholders who bought into this exercise, they're the ones that need to know what improvements need to be done, what issues come up during the exercise. We also try not to give it out to the media or the public because there's a possibility they could use that against any of the public agencies or private agencies. And also, we try to keep it for official use only. And that's called FOU? FOU. And that's what it's made basically for official use only. And we don't want it out to the public. We want to make sure the responders and the governments, local governments and state governments are feel comfortable with what they have to achieve during these exercises. Okay, I'm in the media. What's wrong with me knowing about it? The public has a right to know. What if you get that kind of stuff? FOU is really not a classification of the document. It's not like top secret or secret material. But it is material that is sensitive. It's sensitive nature to the local and state governments. It's basically outlining some of the information, maybe their plans, their procedures, their outcomes, their protocols that are proprietary in nature and are close hold in nature. And we don't necessarily want to basically show our hand to our adversaries out there. If it's an exercise that has to do with anti-terrorism, we don't want to show our adversaries our hand where our weak spots are, as well as our strengths because then they won't play against our strengths, they'll play against our weak spots. And again, we're talking about dealing with terrorist acts where people are trying to do damage and harm to us. We're not necessarily talking about a hurricane or a weather event, something like that. Granted, and also too, in some of this information, we also don't want this information being released in an all hazards type of scenario. We don't want to cause undue panic or undue upset of the population that they're getting the idea or impression from the exercise that things are not going as well as they should be. I mean, granted, there are things that are going to happen in a real world incident, as well as an exercise they have no control on that you have to deal with. That's our job, that's our responsibility, but we don't want to cause undue public unrest or upset. Let me follow up on that. We're not excluding the media completely. The media is still going to be involved with the exercise in one way or another, whether it's a joint information group committee or it's just them using their expertise on when it comes to interviewing, doing an exercise. So the media is not totally excluded from all this. They are still involved with the exercise itself, but it's the information afterwards with the after-action report that we try to keep confident. Yes, Josh. I would agree with that completely. In fact, it's vital for us to involve the media in as much of the planning and exercising as we can for these activities. They are partners in this situation. In the real world this is an aspect that we would need to be familiar with and so to involve in the exercise as well as real world events is important. It's vital. The best way for us to get information out to the public is through our partners in the media and so keeping them involved is very important, but I would agree definitely that keeping them, keeping the after-action report sort of close hold is very important as well. So people can be honest about what worked and they can say we screwed up without somebody crucifying them for it in the media. Let's talk about another very important part that we'll talk about a little bit more in our program is the improvement plan. Actually beginning at this process of making sure that you have an improvement plan in place at the end. Well, the improvement plan is our buy-in for the federal, state and local participants in the exercise and even for us from ODP from the exercise managers because within 60 days after an ODP funded exercise, a federal preparedness assistance money funded exercise, we required that the states and locals after that exercise is conducted provide us with a hard copy or copy of the after-action report and their improvement plan. Now it may be in draft initially, but after they have looked at it and have done their after-action conference and agreed upon the aspects of and the contents of the AAR and those contents of the AAR would then be included into the improvement plan which as the lead-in piece identified, it's in a strategy, it's identifies goals and objectives, it also identifies responsibility of individuals who either an individual or an agency has to have a certain role and capability that they have to fulfill as well as a timeline is when they should accomplish these tasks that need to be done and also it provides an accountability document because therefore the federal participants and the federal folks are ensuring that the money is being wisely spent as well as state and locals are actually getting the biggest bang for their buck on the money that they're spending. And boy, isn't that more important now than ever after what we've seen what happened with FEMA in a couple of instances with these hurricanes? Well, funding, we work and live under a constrained resource environment. We're never gonna have enough of people, never gonna have enough of time, enough enough of funding to do everything we have to do so we have to prioritize. And that's what the after-action review process and that's what the improvement plan process does. It focuses our attention on what needs to be done. Immediately it gives us a priority that identifies that one thing that we have to do as soon as we possibly can and identifies responsibility because if everybody has to do it, it's not gonna get done but if you tag one person to do it, it'll get done. Josh, let me, let's come back to the real world. Tell me in a real world exercise that you've been a part of, how this helped you out? Well, one thing that the HCEP doctrine does that really helps me out as a state level person is prior to dissemination of volume two which provided us a template after-action report. We received after-action reports from various exercises that looked completely different and there was no consistency between each report. Now that we have the HCEP methodology that puts everything under, this is the order that you should follow. It really helps the state out as we in turn then publish that after-action report onto the ODP Secure Portal. That's our means of giving that to the federal government and showing this is our preparedness activity, this is what we're doing and so HCEP has really helped me out in that regard. Dave, on the local level as well. I've noticed on the local level when we first started doing exercises in West Virginia is that we've had a lot of improvements in our improvement plan, a lot of issues, a lot of recommendations. As we still practice with different exercises through the last four years, we noticed the improvement plan getting smaller because as you work with that improvement plan and try to address your issues, your improvements will come up and your exercise has become more of a more structured exercise. But the improvement plan is very important and it's something that we need to make sure that is our final document and how we're gonna address the issues down the line. All right, now we've kind of skimmed over some of these topics and we'll be talking about them more specifically in just a minute. But just a reminder to you, that St. Petersburg College actually issues what are called continuing education units or CEUs for live response programs. If you'd like to register for those CEUs, here's what you do. You go to the NTPI website and click on the continuing education units link under training. Now that link will take you through the registration process, also the login process. After you log in, you'll be able to view program videos, take the program exam and fill out an evaluation form with an exam grade of 75% or better. You will immediately receive an online CEU certificate. Also, after viewing live response, please complete a viewer evaluation form of this program because your input and comments are very, very important to us. Stay with us. Let's take a look at what's coming up in our next ComNet program. The mission of the Public Health Services Commissioned Corps is to provide highly trained and mobile health professionals that promote the health of the nation. David Klu visited with members of the Commissioned Corps to talk about how they're used in the recovery effort. The Office for Domestic Preparedness prepares America's emergency responders through training designed to meet the needs of state and local communities. Diane Roberts looks at the new initiatives in the Office for Domestic Preparedness Training programs. ComNet continues the series on the Citizen Corps programs by highlighting the Neighborhood Watch. Stacy Phillips spoke with members of Neighborhood Watch about how private citizens can play a crucial role in the detection and prevention of terrorist acts. Join us for all this and the latest in responder news. ComNet airs Wednesday, December 14th at 2 p.m. Eastern. For more information, make sure to register online at terrorism.spcollege.edu. Welcome back everyone. Remember, Live Response is a live interacting program and we welcome and encourage you to participate. You at home can be part of this discussion by calling this number 1-888-703,000. Write it down or you'll forget it. Or you can fax your questions to us at 727-341-4141. Always remind people if you have a question for our panel, call in early. Don't wait to the end of the program because there's a good chance you won't make it through. Well, successful exercise reporting will assist the community's ongoing effort to improve training. The after-action report is a tool that can be used to provide feedback. Summarize what happened and show the capabilities of a jurisdiction. The AAR involves, first of all, involves somebody taking responsibility and raising their hand and saying, I am going to make sure that the after-action report gets done. Hence, I will take care of the evaluation, the assessment process and data collection processes. If you do it right, you've involved that person and or the evaluation team from the get-go when planning for your exercises. The biggest mistake that I see made is we think about the evaluation process when we're well into the exercise planning process. You get into details such as who participated, using an overview of the scenario, the date the exercise was conducted, who the exercise was sponsored by, those type of logistical details that go into the front end of the after-action report. Then you usually insert a timeline of events. When did the exercise start? What was the initiating triggering incident that took place and then all the activities or all the events that took place during the course of the exercise? Then you list the observations. If it was an operations-based exercise, usually those are tactical-oriented observations. If it's a discussion-based exercise, usually the observations are more geared toward policy plans and procedures. Then you get into recommended courses of action. What are the jurisdictions going to do to address those observations? If someone noted that the hazmat officers needed more training, that there was a lack of communication, a lack of coordination amongst other agencies, what recommended courses of actions should they take to correct that situation? Welcome back, everybody, as we continue our discussion. One thing that I want to touch on that I wasn't sure if we made really clear is that when you have to fill out this post-exercise report, that's to be done within 60 days. Who has that actually sent to? That's sent to the Department of Homeland Security Office for Domestic Repairness Exercise Manager. That's an individual that has already pre-identified, been working with the state and local jurisdictions, like someone like myself, for example, that would be asking for and be soliciting that report and input into that report. That report would be submitted to us electronically and through the llis.gov website, as well as can be also put on the ODP portal for us to review. But the llis.gov website, that would be for the final copy of the finalized after-action report, whereas the ODP portal would be the draft portion, which is very close-hold, secure portal. Well, now that we've talked about the planning phase and what goes into that and of the after-action report and those kinds of things, we want to talk about actually the post-evidence reporting components. And I love this first, I don't know whoever thought of this first phrase, but this is a great phrase. I may go back to my newsroom and use it. The player hot wash. Dave, what is a player hot wash? Well, in other terms, it's more or less feedback. This is where you're going to have a little critique and it's going to happen immediately after the exercise. You're going to get your participants and your stakeholders together after the exercise and you're going to generate feedback from them. Three things you want to ask them, what went wrong? What issues did we have? How are you going to, I think we ought to correct those issues and what kind of good things came out of it also. You want to try to get negative and positive feedback because all of that's going to be put together with the after-action report. It also depends on type of exercise you're going to have, whether it's going to be a discussion or an operational type exercise. A discussion will be more of a tabletop or seminar workshop exercise where you always have discussion. You may just have one big hot wash right there afterwards. If you have a full-scale exercise or a functional exercise, then you might have different functional areas such as law enforcement, EMS, fire, security. You could have administrative EOCs, but if you have something larger like that, then you can also, your evaluators and controllers will take care of that functional area and generate the feedback. Now Josh, how honest do you think people are during this play or hot wash, knowing that people might get in a situation where they're going, well, I don't ever want to pardon expression bitch about equipment or gripe about this because I think I've got a bad attitude. How much real, good, honest feedback do you get? Well, to be completely honest, right here, I think the hot wash is perhaps one of the most telling signs of an exercise. How did it go? And that all depends on the facilitator of the hot wash. If they do a good job of truly allowing it to be a player hot wash, allowing the players to say what they saw, what they felt, what they didn't see that they should have seen, that really allows them to open up and be honest. The hot wash is not meant for the upper levels or the agency heads, it's really meant for those who played in the exercise. Evaluators should be given just a very short time in that period and not to ever provide any critiques. Mostly just say, great job, you guys did good. What do you think you did? Mostly they should be sitting back taking further notes because this is where the honest, true interaction of this is what happened from my end as a player, this is what I saw. Now Dave, give me a concrete example of a player hot wash. What have you done? What exercises have you done and what were some of the comments that you got back? Well, we had some exercises in West Virginia where we utilized one biological exercise, functional exercise where we had six emergency operation centers up and running during this exercise. One of them involved the county emergency operation center which is the main operation center. We had two hospitals involved with their own operation center and we also had the university located in Morgantown participate with two separate emergency operation center, one administrative and one operational. With our biological exercise, we found that communication was a big problem between all the different emergency operation center. There's a possibility with a biological incident, you're gonna have a joint operation centers and communication, coordination, control or the three basic things that need to be covered. And with us and our exercises, what feedback we got was we didn't have any communication. We lacked any radio systems. We lacked direct line access. We lacked any communication from the main emergency operation center to the outside emergency operation centers. So we tried to address that the best we could and come up with some improvements with those issues. All right, we have somebody who has already faxed us in a question. This comes to us from North Carolina. It says that I am a member of the public health preparedness funded by a grant from Homeland Security via CDC. Question, are we required to report all tabletop exercises we conduct? That's the first part of the question. Yes, no? If it's federally prepared assistance grant money that is providing support, you should be reporting your after action reports and your improvement plan back to the federal agency that's giving you that funding. If it's a CDC grant and money's coming from CDC, you'll have to follow the rules of the game from the CDC. And it says, if not reporting, should this be changed or yeah, should this be changed to report them within 60 days? What happens if you don't report them? Well, I'm not too sure on the CDC and on their program right now, what their requirements are for feedback on their supported exercises. But as I said, for the standard right now from the Department of Homeland Security for Office for Domestic Preparedness, if you're receiving federal preparedness assistance monies from us and you're conducting an exercise with our monies, we would want a copy of your after action report improvement plan within 60 days of the exercise. Okay, I'm getting an idea. They did an exercise and it's been longer than 60 days, should they still report it? I would, I would, I would. I mean, nobody is gonna penalize you if you're late on the report submission. We just want to provide, get that information and gather this information because the overall program for the Homeland Security Exercise and Valuation Program, it's a nationwide program. It's also a way of us as the federal government to gather information on state and local enterprises and activities that are occurring with domestic incident management so that we also can assess their capabilities as well as look at providing some feedback and getting us some information from them for so that we can call out best practices and lessons learned that we can provide for other jurisdictions as an ad-need basis. All right, anybody want to add anything to that? I'd make comments that he should provide that at least to the county organization, the agency. Any information, if they weren't involved with it, any information that the public health department has done should be forwarded to the emergency management agency so they can update their emergency response plans accordingly for any health or biological incident that may occur. That information is pretty vital and any issues or recommendations that come out that could be helpful down the line. It's also, I guess if I would add, not that difficult. The HC methodology provides a very standardized way to do this reporting and it's very easy to access that knowledge through the Volume 2 or Volume 4 through the secure portal through your state administrative agency that can provide that access to you, can provide templates to you to really assist you in that process as well. You should have subject matter experts in your state that can assist you in that as well because you usually have a day-to-day life of a full-time job doing other things. This is hard to fit that in sometimes and so a lot of states have done a very good job, I think, of providing assistance in that after-action reporting. And from a federal perspective, it's just like Dave said, I mean, we look forward to the state and local individuals contacting their local emergency managers and their local emergency officials either in the city, county, or state level and provide that information to them. They don't have to avoid going to those folks. We don't want them, in fact, to avoid going to those folks. We want them to go to those folks first and then come to us on the federal level. You know, when in doubt, ask and not worry about it. You know, the public health is part of the plan. I mean, everybody's a part of a large plan and so any information that you can come out with good recommendations, good improvement plans that you can incorporate into your own county or city emergency operations plan is very useful. Okay, we have talked about to recap player hot wash, its purpose, when it occurs, its functioning, the fact that it's divided up functionally depending upon what areas you are actually testing for or participating in. Let's talk about constructing the AAR specifically, Josh. Again, talking about the AAR, you can receive templates from that, from ODP's four volumes on HCEAP. Volume two specifically addresses evaluation methodology. Volume four is more of an online rather than just paper format but it provides templates and examples that you can use in that. There are several main points that need to be covered in an after action report and those are the exercise overview which is a report summary, sort of an executive summary. We then go into goals and objectives, the events synopsis, analysis of mission outcomes and then an analysis of critical task performance. That's really when we get into the down into the details of what happened, what didn't happen, what are some analysis from that and some recommendations from that, consequences perhaps. Then we end up with a conclusion and then the improvement plan gets added on as sort of an appendancy to that. Okay, now we're getting another question. People are a little confused but let's make sure we are very clear on this. What exactly is the HCEAP? Now I know we've said it before because we keep referring back to it as this is the methodology that you should follow but for the layman who's just listening to this program for the first time now, what exactly is that? Well, HCEAP stands for the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program. It really is a methodology or a way that we provide exercises either in the conduct all the way to the after-action report. It promotes a cycle of activity, a building block approach starting with seminars, working up to drills, tabletops, functional exercises, full-scale exercises and it incorporates a lot of issues that were handled in several different programs, sort of best practices, if you will, and puts them all into one program that can hopefully meet the exercise needs for whether you're working under a CDC program, a REP program or an emergency management program. Bottom line, as you said earlier, I don't know whether it's before the program but it basically is a template for people to use because I know a lot of the first responders that I talk to, they say, you know following these government guidelines would be so much easier if we literally had a checklist because, and that makes it simpler and that's what the HCEAP actually is, is not. Well, it is, that is part of the overall program, the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program. It also provides policy and guidance on how to do exercises and how to conduct it nationwide. It also provides training. We have some training initiatives that we wanna do. So it's standardized exercise and conduct and evaluation conduct as well as we are also providing technology and technological assistance on online tools going through the portal, providing the templates and guides and the draft documents that people can use in order to formulate their exercises as well as their evaluation process, as well as we provide direct support. Whereas we can provide vendor-supported exercise support such that we could bring in one of our contract vendors at the state and local agencies or jurisdiction cannot conduct an exercise to do not have the support to do an exercise. We can come in and help, we don't supplant their exercise capabilities but we help supplement their exercise capabilities and we can provide that. And that's all under the umbrella of the Homeland Security Exercise Evaluation Program which supports the National Exercise Program which supports and is based on the National Incident Management System. And Dave, let me just run out last point here. After action conference, what is that and what's the purpose of it? After the after action report is put together and submitted in the ODP, they give us her approval that it looks okay. We come back with an after action conference. We get together the stakeholders that are involved with this exercise. We also have the planning committee there that put this exercise together. They review this exercise or this after action report thoroughly, make sure that what was brought up at the hot wash and the previous meetings that is covered in that after action report. With this after action report, we can take that information and use that for the improvement plan that's gonna be attached with that. Right, and the bottom line is folks, if you're watching this, there are ways the federal government is here through the state and local agencies to help you with whatever tools you need to make these kind of plans take place. You're not alone, there's a tremendous background of other people, thousands that have been working on these plans to help you formulate a plan that is cognizant, it accomplishes goals, and it gets what needs to be done, done, documented, and you move on to improvement, which is what we're gonna talk about in just a couple of minutes here. Now don't forget that you can register online for our CEUs at our NTPI website. Also, you can help ensure that we are meeting your learning needs by filling out one of our evaluation forms. This one's a lot simpler. Submit an evaluation form with our program, just go to the NTPI website and click on evaluation. Well, the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program encourages each state and local jurisdiction to implement a cycle of exercises that cover a wide range of threats and tests their abilities to perform essential tasks. The goal of exercise evaluation is to validate strengths and identify areas that need improvement. The improvement planning is the most important piece that you can do after an exercise. It lists the recommendations from the after-action report, which are usually broad in nature, conduct more training, purchase more equipment, revise SOP as planned procedures. The improvement plan is a strategy for implementing what you've learned from the exercise. And the priority of that implementation is getting the stuff done to fix the problems that you found in the exercise. The best thing that we have found as far as implementing those lessons that we've learned is to, first of all, obviously identify what the problem is. Second of all, identify a solution to the problem. Task that to an individual by name who will get that strategy implemented to change the problem by a certain deadline, by a certain time. Otherwise, it falls to the cracks, it doesn't get done because people have other things in their jobs that they need to accomplish. Don't forget, we're an interactive program. That means we'd like to hear from you. We encourage your participation. Our panel would love to hear any questions that you have for us by calling 1-888-703-1000. You don't have many more minutes to do that before we're actually off the air. Or you can faxes your questions at 727-341-4141. No question is too simple for our panel to answer. Now, let's get back to the third segment that we're talking about is the improvement plan. We've planned an exercise, we've completed the exercise, we've gone through the after-action reports, and now we're talking about what I call the meat and potatoes of where do we go from here? Well, the improvement plan, as we talked about earlier, is vital. And it's something that is perhaps a little bit new to a lot of exercise programs. And again, it's lined out in the HC methodology in a simple format of what they call an IPM or improvement plan matrix. And that basically details who is going to do what and hopefully sort of a timeline for completion with that. And when these items occur, it's important to check back, make sure, check them off the list, and get that reported back to ODP so that we know that we are making improvements. With that then, that also incorporates into your multi-year plan, which is something that all states need to accomplish is to create an overall strategy, a long-term goal as to this is where we want to go. And they also do that with exercise specifically as to maybe this year we wanna test the SNS plan, next year we want to work on several other procedures, our new state emergency operations plan, things like that, that all rolls into that cycle of, okay, this is what we learned from this past exercise, this is what we were supposedly going to improve upon. Hopefully we've done that. We tested again the following year to make sure that new issues have an arisen from that or that we've actually effectively taken care of that situation. And that helps with the overall strategy for the states and locals, because the states and locals are also required by ODP under the Homeland Security Grant Program to develop a strategy, a multi-preparedness strategy. And there's many facets of that strategy, it's equipment, it's training, it's personnel, it's planning, exercises and improvement plans and after-action review process is just one part of that overall support structure, support that strategy. And it's a multi-year effort, it's a multi-year, because every year you're going to be doing something and once that year is completed, it's going to fall off, so you're going to take out another out year to start reviewing your strategy. Just like Josh said, it's a process that's ongoing, it's dynamic, it's not stagnant. Now you talked about tracking implementation, Dave, who does that? Because I'm thinking of first responders and the guys are going, hey, wait a minute, I've got enough that fills my day for 24 hours, you're going to add another 24 on top of that? Right, I mean, they don't want that extra work burden. So this comes out of your after-action conference, this is where you get together and you decide, okay, who's going to be responsible for each area or each agency that has some issues to be taken care of. You normally will have one person coordinating the whole thing, making sure all the different agencies are going to be represented. And then each agency should have one person who's responsible for that area to make sure that this can be implemented and that they follow the timeline, and that timeline will be also established at that after-action conference too, to where you can make sure that it's done in a timely manner. One thing that we've done in the state of Idaho is to actually appoint a liaison officer at the state level, and that's their job, is to go back and check in with those local agencies and say, this is what you identified you would like to improve, have you done that? If not, how can we help you? Is it a funding issue? Can we get you more equipment? Can we get you more training? Can we assist you in adjusting your plan? And that's a delicate position, and that person has to be very good at not stepping on toes and really allowing the locals to do what they identified. They wanted to improve upon, but it's also very vital that we track accurately what is and is not being done so that we don't have exercises three and four years in a row that identify the same problem because things just weren't able to get done because perhaps the agency didn't have the resources. We have a phone call that's coming into us right now. Robert's joining us from Georgia. Robert, thank you for your phone call and what's your question? Yeah, hi, I'm with American Medical Response in LaGrange, Georgia. We've had a very good live action drill this summer, and even though we haven't received a DHS ODP grant directly, how should we report that to the department so that we can use that in future grant submissions and what would be the best way to do that? And I'll take my answer off the line. All right, thank you. The best way to do that, responding to the caller about submitting that report, that's not an exercise that is not ODP funded or federally preparedness assistance grant funding, is to submit your report through your chain of command, so to speak, through your county or city emergency management office, and then they should be submitting that report up to the state administrative agency or the state administrative point of contact that deals with federal preparedness assistance or overall state preparedness assistance. I mean, that information can be brought up to the forefront. As we said, or previous in the telecast, is that we want people to start working, identifying with your key emergency managers and your emergency coordinators within your communities and within the county and the states, and work with those folks and give that information. We don't want the information to just be close hold or held down at the lowest level. The only way any of this information is going to benefit any of us as if it's shared, and that's the whole point of the Homeland Security Exercise Evaluation Program is a sharing. It's a national comprehensive exercise and evaluation program. It's for everybody to get information and information sharing. It's like resource management and mutual aid under the National Institute of Management System. We all have to have a clear understanding of the entire process. And you know, a phrase that we mentioned when we were talking about this before we went on the air that I loved and I circled it because I think we need to talk about that, is that these after-action reports and the improvement plans are meant to be written in the positive, in the affirmative, as one of you said, it is a no-fault type report. I like that knowledge, I like the way this phrase. Well, it is, to a lot of degrees, it really, really is. And we want to do that, even when we were developing the terminology for the improvement plan. Well, we had different terms, for example, corrective action plan, correction plan, so on. And we were talking about the word corrective. It seemed that it had a negative connotation that we were going to be, we from the federal government were going to be telling people how to correct their stuff and be very prescriptive. And we're not, we're really not in the business of trying to tell people how to do things, to a certain extent. Now, granted, we have to have a national standardization. We have to have interoperability. We have to have mutual aid support. But, bottom line on an improvement plan, we view that as a state and local issue. They're going to have to deal with that situation. It's going to be an incident, like our basic philosophy in the Department of Homeland Security, if something happens within the country, within the country, the incident is going to be a local incident. It's going to be handled locally by the first responders. And they're going to have to deal with it. So, if they do an exercise and they do an evaluation process and improvement plan, it's the local responders responsibility to deal with that situation. Now, we in the federal government have a supporting role in all of this, but we're not going to be the first responders in a lot of cases. Now, how do you, I don't want to use the word steer, because that sounds like you're trying to, but how do you make sure that what you're getting in the improvement plan is something that is real based on what is really out there versus what I call, and again, pardon the expression, the bitch list, which every organization has. If we had this piece of equipment and this piece of equipment, and if we had this piece of equipment, and what percentage of the respondents do you get back are in that nature of more equipment, and the rest saying, maybe we have some communication problems or otherwise. What percentage would you say? Well, I would say that you're always going to have that a little bit, to an extent. No system will be created that will accurately assess and give those who participated a say in the evaluation process and the after-action process without allowing them that space to sort of vent and put that, we'll call it a wish list together. And with that, this program though, I think does a fairly good job in allowing them to get their input, but then it's not just done, it's not just captured right then and there, and that's the after-action report. This is a system that's followed up on, as we said, sometimes the draft can take up to 60 days to put together, and with input from all participating agencies, and we don't just look at equipment needs, but we identify planning needs, training needs, as well as equipment. So we try and get the jurisdictions to look at all of those facets, and as well, they're not just self-evaluating, we have evaluators that that's what they're looking at as well, so. All right, we have another question. Is there a website with exercises already prepared that can be downloaded for use without much changing? If not, could a share site be set up? Do we have one that is already set up? There is something that is coming down the road that will help quite a bit, and that is through HCEAP, there is a toolkit being developed, and that is an online program that will really guide you through the entire exercise design, development, coordination, and evaluation process, and that can, you can access other exercises that have already taken place and look at those scenarios and adjust them, that helps you with your timeline, but also ellis.gov, L-L-I-S, will help you with those as well, providing scenario options. As well as we, if you go to our volume four, which is a compendium of templates of guides and information to design, designing exercise and evaluation tools, you can download templates, as long as you have password and ID access to the website, you can download that information and can use it for your exercise and also your evaluation design and development. Okay, I'm gonna play real dumb. I've never used any of these websites and I've never looked anywhere. Where is the one site that if I look to begin with, they'll help me walk through this process? Which one do you think? The best website right now that you can go to would be the, our website, H-S-E-E-P. Okay, right, H-S-E-E-P.dhs.gov. D-H-S.gov. That's our new web page. It's H-H-T-P. Triple W. Triple W. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can Google that site and that will give you to our web page and our web page has a lot of links to our volumes one through four. It also has some background information as well as you can call the office for domestic preparedness to our C-S-I-D line, our helpline or information line and they can also provide you information or steer you to the right individuals at the office for domestic preparedness that can help you with your exercise design. Dave. And to follow up with Mike saying is that if you get on the website there and you look at volume two, it will give you some outlines on the EEG's evaluation guidelines and also a matrix of how an improvement plan should be put together. That can help you get started with some sort of a plan. Now, do you find that as we are sitting here, do you feel like you're preaching to the choir out here or is this something that's new enough that still needs to be integrated more successfully throughout all the United States? Well, I would hope that it would continue to be integrated. There's still a lot of programs that are kind of on their own and doing the same methodology they have been doing for years and for some that's great. This is a new program, fairly new. I think the inception was 2003 for a lot of this material and since then a lot of more material has come out and it'll continue to evolve. DHS through ODP has put a lot of time and effort and resources into this so it's a good program. It's becoming a very comprehensive program and it's very all-inclusive. I think as we move towards capability analysis throughout the nation, it's going to be very important to create a standardized program that we're all on board with, we're all going to use so that we can test that on a standardized way. It's a great testament about the information that both Dave and Josh are able to share with the viewers today is that it's just not Mike Kaminski for the federal government talking. Matter of fact, the less I talk, the better off I sound. But these gentlemen are from state and local agencies. They are managing this program at their level and you can see from their comments how versatile and how effective and efficient this process is. And our role from the federal government is just to support them in their activities. If we can do this because we're running out of time, let's run through point D really quickly. The follow-up and the future initiatives and you can just tick each one of those items. On the universal tasks and target capabilities, it's just like Josh mentioned, is that we are moving forward to a capabilities-based exercise management as well as capability-based and domestic incident management system within the United States. That's based on Homeland Security Presidential Directive Number Eight, the National Preparedness Goal. More to come on that, keep aware of that. Okay, and talk about the equipment purchasing, Dave. Yeah, having the exercises like the program is very proactive. It's a good system for purchasing equipment. And one of the things that we found out in our location is our first exercise of communication with inside some of these buildings. We cannot communicate very well at all amongst the first responders. So in conjunction with that and also with the recent seat and hall fire, the West Virginia University and the city of Morgantown got together and worked out an agreement where the university provided assistance to the city of Morgantown to purchase radio communications for all firefighters for the response to the university. And Josh, you've got 20 seconds for the final word on training. Okay, training is vital. And we don't exercise without training being a part of that component. There's a lot of training going on right now. There are a lot of future initiatives to provide standardized training for exercise, development, design, evaluation, control, simulation and to bring that all through and to coordinate past efforts from EMI and FEMA with ODP. And so we're really looking forward to what's gonna happen there. All right, great information. And thank you so much for joining us today panel. Great stuff here. You're not alone up there. Lots of information available to help you with your exercises. Now, a reminder for you our next live response program put it on your calendars January the 25th at 2 p.m. Eastern. And the topic of discussion will be on the Metropolitan Medical Response System. And of course, come that comes to you December the 14th at 2 p.m. Eastern and be sure to register at terrorism.spcollege.edu for any of those websites that we have mentioned today. We're out of time. Thank you so much for your time. Hope this program has been helpful to you. Until next time, I'm Al Rochelle.