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| Purpose of an Emergency Preparedness Audit |
| By Jeffrey A. Schwartz, Ph.D. and Cynthia Barry, Ph.D., LETRA, Inc. |
| Published: 09/05/2005 |
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Conducting emergency preparedness audits of institutions is important for a number of reasons. Some reasons are obvious, others more subtle. An audit validates a comprehensive emergency preparedness system. For a prison, comprehensive readiness for crises, natural disasters, and major emergencies is no easy matter; it is a far reaching effort that can take years to fully develop and can require large amounts of money, staff time, management attention, and other scarce resources. An audit specific to emergency preparedness makes a strong statement that all of the work undertaken to develop and maintain the emergency system has been intended, planned, and coordinated. Perhaps the most obvious reason for an audit is that it provides management with an objective assessment of the progress and status of the emergency system. Because a prison's emergency system is necessarily large and multifaceted, nothing short of a systematic audit procedure will effectively evaluate the system. An institution's emergency preparedness coordinator may be familiar with several substantial problems and may also have several initiatives awaiting funding or management commitment. However, the coordinator is inevitably too close to the system-too involved in the system and too familiar with what is in place-to serve as an independent evaluator. To varying degrees, the same will be true of the institution's managers and emergency specialists, who may be quite familiar with its emergency preparedness and response capabilities. An objective and detailed audit process can surmount these limitations. For management, then, the emergency preparedness audit offers the opportunity to identify weaknesses, deficiencies, developing problems, areas of vulnerability, inconsistencies, and simple mistakes in the facility's emergency preparedness efforts. The audit also provides an opportunity to evaluate or reevaluate resource allocation. For example, a prison's CERT program may have become more and more expensive because of costs associated with increased training time and shooting practice, while its hostage negotiators have stopped training regularly and have not worked together for more than a year. It may be time for the institution's administrators to revisit the priorities reflected in the allocation of their training resources. Such questions of resource allocation and relative priorities run throughout a comprehensive emergency system. Relatively frequent audits can help the correctional leader identify tendencies toward complacency and "cutting corners" in critical practices. Audits can also offset the dangerous consequences of faster turnover in management and supervisory positions. Rapid turnover means a loss of knowledge and experience in important areas. Without regular audits, an institution's policies and post orders may come to bear little resemblance to actual practice. Another central purpose of an emergency preparedness audit is to verify compliance with standards and policies. Regardless of whether the standards or policies involved are at the departmental or facility level, or whether the standards are external (e.g., from the American Correctional Association) or internal, the point is that the organization has adopted them and expects them to be followed. Compliance with stated standards and policies goes hand in hand with accountability, which is essential to any management endeavor. However, even if a policy is well written, disseminated, discussed, and reinforced by training, compliance is not guaranteed. Although first-line supervisors generally carry the primary responsibility for day-to-day compliance with policies, and institutions often need to reinforce an individual policy or check on how it is being followed, the best way to ensure compliance with policies, standards, and written procedures in a broad area such as emergency preparedness is to conduct an area wide audit. An audit may also be an excellent staff development tool and increase staff awareness of crucial issues related to emergency preparedness. This function of the audit applies not only to the audit team members but to the institution's staff at large. As the audit team reviews records, asks about emergency procedures, observes emergency responses, and focuses on the less visible aspects of emergency readiness, the institution's staff read the message clearly: management thinks emergency preparedness is important and is checking to see if things are as they should be. Inevitably, staff other than audit team members spot deficiencies as the audit progresses. In addition, when management takes corrective actions after reviewing audit findings, those actions are likely to have greater impact because of the staff's heightened awareness of emergency issues. Further, employees who have not understood why some procedures were necessary for emergency readiness may come to appreciate the rationale for those procedures. Finally, the audit offers the institution staff a chance to learn "best practices" with regard to emergency preparedness. All of these reasons point to the same conclusion: an audit of an institution's emergency preparedness system provides an opportunity to improve the system. That is the ultimate goal. If management does not subscribe to that goal, then there is little point to engaging in a vigorous, demanding, and detailed evaluation of the emergency system. (The same can be said of any kind of large-scale institutional audit, and this guide's focus on emergency preparedness in no way suggests that an audit in this area is more important than, or conceptually different from, a security audit or other kinds of major audits.) |
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