INTRODUCTION
Healthcare professionals face the challenge of balancing their day-to-day efforts and the requirement of preparing for a mass casualty event. The mass casualty event could be a school bus crash involving 30 high school students, a dozen workers exposed during a chlorine tanker spill, or hundreds of people who think they were exposed to a bioterrorism agent. How would your organization respond to each of these scenarios? A thorough emergency management plan helps an organization switch gears and react to each of these events.

Content level: Intermediate/advanced

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After completing this activity, the participant should be able to:

• describe the four-step exercise cycle.
• list the major products of a training exercise and how they relate to each other.
• develop exercise objectives and training objectives.
• describe the five exercise types as defined by Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
• provide tips for setting participants up for success.
• describe examples of training aides and give examples of how to incorporate them to improve an exercise.