Emergency Management for Healthcare

CHAPTER 2

Command and Control for Healthcare

Introduction

In the last chapter, we discussed a variety of what might be called “mainstream” command and control models, including both the Incident Command System (ICS) and the Incident Management System (IMS), and examined how they operated. While these models may work exceedingly well in the community setting, there are fundamental realities which challenge their ability to be fully effective in a hospital or healthcare setting.

Hospitals, for very valid reasons, require their own, specialized, Command and Control systems. Disasters often have both immediate and long-term effects on both population health and on health delivery, in both the developed and the developing world.¹ That being said, ...